Voting as Unmasking: The Political Theory of Legitimacy-Concerned Protest Voting and Abstention

This paper explores the moral intuition that it is pro tanto wrong to participate in elections in illegitimate electoral regimes because participation wrongfully contributes to an illusion of legitimacy that such regimes aim to maintain with elections. More crudely, the intuition is that electoral participation is pro tanto wrong when it legitimizes an illegitimate regime. This idea has received very limited attention in normative political theory, even though it has accompanied the modern political history of mass democracy—in the first half of the 20th century, primarily in radical political thought, while in the early 21st century, prominently based on a liberal-democratic critique of electoral autocracies. My aim is to make sense of this worry of wrongful legitimization by electoral participation and assess its moral weight in the ethics of voting in electoral autocracies. I argue that in such regimes, understood as (normatively) illegitimate regimes, electoral participation can wrong fellow-citizens in two ways. First, it may impede democratization by maintaining an illusion of democracy, which hinders mobilization for regime reform or change (democratization). Second, independently of this instrumental consideration, illegitimate electoral regimes (and their ruling elite) commit special wrongs of subjection against their own citizens by maintaining an illusion of legitimacy (or attempting to do so). Voters are complicit in both wrongs if they contribute to the illusion of legitimacy. They have two moral reasons, I argue, to unmask this illusion: a positive duty to establish legitimate political conditions and a negative duty to avoid complicity. Finally, I show that voters should unmask the illusion of legitimacy in electoral autocracies specifically through electoral conduct. The argument does not conclusively argue for electoral abstention in such regimes. Even the pro tanto reason to engage in unmasking electoral conduct does not always require abstention. Yet it requires, ceteris paribus, context-specific kinds of conduct—from abstention through spoiling ballots to electoral boycott—that fall within the everyday (lay) concept of protest voting and abstention.