Chapter 2: Procedure, Substance, Democratic Legitimacy: A Framework for the Debate

This book's – and contemporary political theory's – focus on democratic legitimacy by no means implies that democratic legitimacy must have its source in democratic values or procedures. In the following, I outline the spectrum of available rationales and possible relations between democratic procedures and legitimacy. While proceduralist theories assume a necessary connection between democracy and legitimacy, from an instrumentalist perspective, it is also possible to understand non-democratic orders (and decisions generated in non-democratic ways) as “legitimate.”

Political philosophers have held many heated debates over the significance of democratic procedures for political legitimacy. Thomas Christiano's (2004) distinction between monist and dualist theories of legitimacy provides a useful starting point for categorizing the range of conceptions of legitimacy from this perspective: While monist conceptions define legitimacy by means of a single criterion – upholding democratic procedures or realizing procedurally independent values – dualist positions combine both of these criteria. In basic terms, the space of possible answers to the initial question of this book – “what is the role of democratic procedures for political legitimacy?” – comprises three positions: a pure instrumentalism, a pure proceduralism and a “dualist” hybrid conception that combines instrumentalist and proceduralist criteria.¹