Legitimacy as design: Towards a realist theory of crisis in consolidated democracies

This thesis examines legitimacy as a core concept in realist political theory and a renewed focus in social science, aiming to understand the apparent decline in satisfaction with democracy across the West. Part One develops a descriptive account of legitimacy, emphasising the cognitive, emotional, and contextual dimensions of how citizens judge the state. I build on Bernard Williams’ Basic Legitimation Demand (BLD), examining its Hobbesian foundations and extending it using insights from cognitive and social psychology. I argue that states and citizens are boundedly rational actors engaged in mutual processes of interlocution, justification, and judgement. Part Two introduces legitimacy as design: a process shaped by citizens’ interactions with state institutions, technologies, and bureaucrats. These engagements reinforce or undermine the efficacy of the state’s legitimation stories in practice. I argue that the state functions as a general-purpose conceptual technology: an institutional and symbolic framework embedded in citizens’ cognitive structures. Part Three explores the prospects for a legitimacy crisis, tracing the conceptual history of crisis and addressing systems-oriented conceptions of legitimation crisis. It contends that political legitimacy lacks concrete causes and functions more as a perceived correlate shaped by citizens’ experiences. Since consolidated democracies are too materially stable to collapse, a legitimacy crisis cannot take the form of systemic breakdown. Instead, it leads to what I call ‘judgement without judicium.’ I suggest that we must think about the ways in which citizens interact with, reinforce, contest, and reject the designs of the modern state in quotidian ways that, in the aggregate, contribute to ‘legitimacy’ as a quality of political systems.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Robinson, Joseph

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bell, Duncan

• legitimacy
• design
• crisis
• democracy
• realism

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/2b29d42c-d7ed-47cb-83d0-4a8e79e1d8b2/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.120249

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/387484