Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies

Description

Explores how legitimacy should be treated in countries where authoritarian alternatives to democracy lack credibility

• Explains why dissatisfaction with democratic procedures in states like the US and UK is so deeply entrenched and difficult to resolve
• Challenges prevailing narratives that frame states like the US and UK as imminently threatened by authoritarianism
• Brings accounts of legitimacy and ideology together, syncretising insights from liberal political theorists (e.g., Bernard Williams) and critical theorists (e.g., Raymond Geuss)
• Goes beyond existing accounts of legitimacy to develop a new theory
• Develops an account of the relationship between legitimacy and economic inequality, putting political economists (e.g., Thomas Piketty) in conversation with political theorists
• Explores different ways states might try to shore up legitimacy, drawing on the work of psychological political theorists (e.g., Robert Goodin)

In this book, Studebaker develops a theory of legitimacy to explain the crisis of liberal democracy in established democracies, like the United Kingdom and the United States. In these countries there is deep dissatisfaction with political procedures, yet no credible alternatives have emerged. Without alternatives, the crisis cannot produce revolution. Instead, Studebaker suggests that the disagreements that ordinarily lead to political violence instead proliferate throughout the state and society. As the distinction between legitimacy and ideology blurs, efforts to generate legitimacy instead generate greater inequality, pluralism, and gridlock. As different factions try to save democracy in radically different ways, diverse advocates of democracy get in each other’s way and even begin to appear authoritarian to one another. In Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies, Studebaker depicts a legitimacy crisis rife with state capacity problems, in which citizens tell each other many conflicting legitimation stories as they search for ways to live with a dissatisfying political system they cannot replace. The result is a legitimation hydra – a state that is burdened by an excess of narratives, that struggles to take any action at all.