Political Obligation Beyond Obedience: The Challenge of Electoral Autocracies

Do we have political obligation in a non-democratic regime? The answer might seem simple: if (1) political obligation is a duty to obey the law; (2) there is no political obligation/duty to obey the law without legitimate authority; (3) democracy is a necessary condition of legitimate authority; (4) there is no legitimate authority in electoral autocracies; (5) there is no political obligation/duty to obey the law in electoral autocracies. If this is the case then whatever (prudential or even moral) reasons people might have to act in conformity with certain laws in electoral autocracies they have no reason to obey the law (a distinction I borrow from Laura Valentini) or, in other words, they do not have political obligation in electoral autocracies. In the paper I would like to challenge this view on three grounds: first, I find the distinction between obeying the law and acting in conformity with the law rather unhelpful; second, I find the claim that democracy is a necessary condition of legitimate authority also problematic; third, I join that strand of political obligation theory (e. g. Walzer, Rawls, Shklar, Delmas, Fossen) that emphasize that principled resistance should be also included into the concept of political obligation and I believe that if this is the case then we have no reason to insist that legitimate authority is a necessary condition of political obligation. The paper will argue that cases like the question of political obligation in electoral autocracies reveal a deeper conceptual problem about political obligation: namely, that narrowing its scope down to a duty to obey the law obscures who and to whom owes what and why when one has political obligation (a complex of questions of which questions about law-abidance are necessarily just a small part). The paper will briefly show how a relational conception of political obligation might help us undo most of the confusions arising from this overly narrow focus on political obligation as a duty to obey the law.