Disobedience in the Real World: Justified Resistance in Flawed Democracies and Electoral Autocracies

Civil disobedience and other forms of unlawful political resistance occur not only in liberal democracies but also in electoral autocracies and openly authoritarian regimes. Yet most normative political theories of civil disobedience remain tied to assumptions about nearly just societies with legitimate political regimes. They have been criticized as either implausibly permissive, as they put almost no restriction on resistance when these conditions are not given or to put undue restraints on resistance, if the requirements for civil disobedience are upheld in less than nearly just societies. Alternative frameworks cannot fill this gap: theories focused on the ethics of harm risk collapsing political ethics into interpersonal morality, while realist accounts often either take limited interest in an action-guiding normative theory or have objectionably statist implications. This paper addresses a central puzzle: whether, and how, a normative theory of political legitimacy can guide the evaluation of disobedience and resistance across different regime types. This is of particular importance for flawed democracies and electoral autocracies where questions of political protest and resistance are most pressing in reality but rarely addressed by idealized theories. We argue that dominant authority-based concepts of legitimacy, understood as the right to rule correlated with a duty to obey, are ill-suited to this task. They generate overly restrictive accounts of resistance under legitimate regimes and leave legitimacy normatively inert under illegitimate ones. As an alternative, we develop a framework that combines a power-liability concept of legitimacy with an autonomy-based conception of its normative grounds. On this view, legitimacy concerns citizens’ liability to the imposition and enforcement of an institutional order, rather than moral duties to obey particular laws, while autonomy, understood as both personal and political autonomy, supplies the criteria for assessing when such liability is justified. This framework preserves a principled distinction between legitimate and illegitimate regimes while allowing legitimacy-based considerations to play an action-guiding role in both legitimate (democratic) and illegitimate (autocratic) contexts. In liberal and flawed democracies, it reframes civil disobedience as a normal, though constrained, feature of political contestation rather than an exceptional response to grave injustice. In electoral autocracies and closed authoritarian regimes, our account explains why legitimacy continues to constrain the aims, means, and timing of resistance, albeit in different ways, even where there is no obligation to uphold the existing regime. The result is a context-sensitive but principle-driven political theory of civil disobedience and resistance that neither reduces politics to interpersonal morality nor confines normative analysis to idealized democratic settings.