Consent and political legitimacy

Consent plays a leading role in many theories of political legitimacy. Two approaches to theorizing about why consent matters for legitimacy have been dominant: the hypothetical consent approach, which argues that a regime is legitimate insofar as all of its subjects would agree to it under idealized conditions, and the express consent approach, which argues that a regime is legitimate for each subject insofar as that subject has expressly consented to it. In this paper, I argue that both views involve unacceptable idealizations. Instead, I develop and defend a new conception of political legitimacy based on actual consent. According to this view, a state is legitimate insofar as it achieves actual quality consent to rule. Quality consent obtains when a subject consents to her state on the basis of a judgment of governance success, provided that the judgment does not conflict with the government’s minimal aim, i.e. basic security for all subjects. The view that I develop, therefore, values consent to rule in a novel way, permitting it to count in favor of legitimacy even when it is not unanimous. Accordingly, a state comes to be legitimate by governing in such a way as to be widely recognized as doing so successfully by its subjects