Democratic legitimacy: Impartiality, reflexivity, proximity

Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy

Joshua Cohen In this essay I explore the ideal of a 'deliberative democracy'.1 By a deliberative democracy I shall mean, roughly, an association whose affairs are governed by the public deliberation of its members. I propose an account of the value of such an association that treats democracy itself as a fundamental political ideal and not simply as a derivative ideal that can be explained in t...

Plural Voting and J. S. Mill’s Account of Democratic Legitimacy

This paper clarifi es some of the contested ideas put forward by John Stuart Mill by analyzing the reasons and arguments Mill used to support them and demonstrating how these ideas and arguments supporting them are connected into a coherent system. Mill’s theory is placed in wider explanatory framework of democratic legitimacy developed by Thomas Christiano, and is portrayed as a typical exampl...

Democratic Performance and Legitimacy of Parties in Europe

This paper reports an explorative analysis on the development of legitimacy across 20 European democracies. I contend that processes representing democratic performance are conducive to changes in legitimacy. A conceptual and empirical discussion is presented to establish this relationship. Democratic performance appears to change due to less trust in parties as representatives and variations i...

Identifying Sources of Democratic Legitimacy in Established and Emerging Democracies

Between Military Efficiency and Democratic Legitimacy : Mapping Parliamentary

Parliamentary approval can be of crucial importance to ensure the democratic legitimacy of military operations as it can establish public consent to the executive’s use of force. But involving parliament in decisions to deploy military forces may have negative repercussions on the efficiency of operations, e.g. by slowing down decision-making. As the military activity of democracies has been on...