Political Legitimacy and the Function of Institutional Regulation: A Collective Agency Model of Political Normativity

This paper proposes and defends a theoretical model of political legitimacy that explains how substantive standards of legitimacy for political institutions can acquire normativity without grounding in any comprehensive moral doctrine, or political moralities derived from them (such as moral standards of social justice or democracy). It proceeds by presenting and then defending the following propositions. First, a political collective exists whenever there is: (a) a group of agents with some set of shared or common goals; (b) a minimally effective institutional scheme for advancing these shared or common goals; and (c) sufficient overlap and/or mutual identification between the set of agents sharing goals, and the set of agents instantiating the institutions, to achieve a minimal level of functional stability within this system. Second, we can distinguish between the primary institutional function that is constitutive of political institutions (the instrumental function of advancing some specified set of goals), and the ancillary institutional function of regulating these primary institutions, which operates not to advance the goals directly, but rather to preserve the functionality of the primary institutions against some set of standard social threats. Third, standards of political legitimacy are defined as the constitutive principles of these regulative institutional functions. Finally, it is argued that standards of political legitimacy constituted thus possess a distinctively political form of normativity, which is grounded not on the truth or justifiability of any antecedent moral beliefs or commitments, but rather in the agency of the political collectives whose goals and identities the regulative standards of legitimacy function to uphold.