Performance Legitimacy: Extending the Moral Basis of Democratic Legitimacy for a Postliberal World

This paper, which is proposed for panel 7 (Learning from Crises—Democracies Adaptive Capacity), explains the idea of performance legitimacy, how data (including post-crisis data) supports the idea, and why it should play a more prominent role in democratic theory. The notion of performance legitimacy is often associated with one-party rule. Regimes like those in Singapore and the People’s Republic of China generate popular support by effectively meeting people’s expectations with respect to economic growth, educational development, healthcare, and infrastructure. Empirical evidence supports this basis of authority. Billions of people have been lifted out of extreme poverty and global trade has helped push real income growth for the emerging middle class in Asia up by 80%. Similarly, Human Development Index (HDI) trends for East Asia and the Pacific have moved steadily from low human development in 1990 to high human development in 2022. Whether one-party regimes can derive their legitimacy solely from their performance is doubtful. What is less doubtful is that any regime—democratic or otherwise—can remain legitimate if it consistently fails to perform well over time. The second part of this paper uses the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate how human-induced problems can undermine the legitimacy of democratic regimes. Democratic ratings agencies, such as Freedom House, V-Dem, and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), have detailed the ways COVID-19 contributed to the erosion of political legitimacy. But these reports also identified positive examples. Taiwan, South Korea, and New Zealand illustrate how democratic institutions can remain resilient in the face of human-induced hazards without undermining their liberal credentials. COVID-19 demonstrated how deeply ingrained in the functionality of society cross-border risks have become. Addressing these risks requires coordination between regional and global levels of governance. The scale and complexity of decision making across these systems tends to escape democratic representation and other norms of democratic legitimacy. The final section of this paper argues that the notion of performance legitimacy can fill this legitimacy gap by providing a moral basis of authority for expert bodies at both the national and supranational level. Moreover, performance legitimacy can provide an entry point for expanding the moral basis of democratic legitimacy in an increasingly complex world threatened by post-liberal movements. I can do this by (a) offering a bulwark against illiberal movements that privilege executive power, (b) providing a rejoinder to post-liberal theory that seeks to displace liberalism, and (c) providing a normative framework for addressing problems that cascade across local, national, and regional territories. By situating performance legitimacy within democratic governance, this paper reframes the political backlash against democracies following the financial crisis of 2008 and the health crisis of 2019 as a problem of democratic learning and adaptation rather than a justification for post-liberal alternatives. Conceptually developing performance legitimacy, on this view, complements institutional adaptation and design by clarifying how democracies can respond effectively to crises while preserving their liberal commitments.