Why do people obey a government? And how can you use this in your fiction?

At the most basic, people obey for two reasons: they want to, or they are forced to.

(And for many people, both of these are at work at the same time. Margaret Levi calls this quasi-voluntary compliance, and it’s far more effective than relying on either mechanism on its own.)

For the moment, let’s talk about why people might want to obey a government—or to be more precise, because they believe that they should obey. This is the concept of legitimacy, that a government has the right to do what it does, and has the right to demand obedience from its citizens (and conversely, the citizens have a moral obligation to obey). Philosophers and governments have offered many reasons why citizens should obey their governments, but we can boil them down to four categories:

1. Justice demands it. This category encompasses theories of divine right or divine justice; we obey the government because the gods tell us to. It also includes non-theistic theories of justice; if the institutions of government help to maintain a just society, some philosophers say, that creates an obligation on citizens to uphold those institutions. Even if a particular law may be unjust, they say, it still might be necessary to obey the law in order not to weaken the whole system, which maintains social order and justice.

Needless to say, if the gods do not exist or do not merit obedience, or the society as a whole is unjust, this claim to legitimacy loses some of its force. At the extreme, if society is so unjust that total societal collapse would be an improvement, then justice would demand disobedience rather than obedience.

2. Loyalty to our nation compels us. This theory of legitimacy is based on two claims. First, that we each are a part of a larger whole—a family, a nation, a species—and owe our service and sometimes our very lives to that larger group. Second, obedience to the government is the best way to advance the good of the larger group.

If one is more of an individualist, rejecting claims of duty to the group, this claim to legitimacy loses its force in turn. Even if someone believes in group duties in theory, she might reject the worthiness of her particular group and seek to affiliate with another group instead. Finally, one might believe that his government is actually harming the interests of his group, and believe that group loyalty demands disobedience to the government instead.

3. We empower the government through consent. From John Locke on, modern thinkers often base political legitimacy on the consent of the governed. Some thinkers go so far as to say that only consent can ground the power of the government, and that all the other claimed bases for legitimacy (like divine right, for example) are insufficient.

The tricky thing is that in the real world, citizens have almost never freely consented to their governments. In the United States, for example, we adopted the Constitution over 200 years ago; almost no American since then has ever been given the choice to consent to the government we live under. Facing this difficulty, advocates of consent theory often fall back on some version of tacit consent; by continuing to participate in society, you implicitly endorse the original episode of consent.

But tacit consent has limited moral force, because citizens are almost always subject to some sort of constraint or coercion. For example, if we are born in a given country, it takes a great effort to move to a different one. Voting in an election does not necessarily imply consent to your government; you might be voting for the lesser of two evils, out of mere self-defense. And there is no practical way to “secede” from your government if you do not want to consent to its rule over you (so-called Sovereign Citizens notwithstanding!). So one could reasonably argue that mere participation in society does not imply that you consented to that society.

4. Legitimacy from providing benefits. Some thinkers essentially believe that when the government provides a benefit, such as health care or national defense, that creates an obligation in the citizenry to obey—perhaps out of gratitude, perhaps out of the need to participate in order to make the benefit available to your fellows.

These theories are hotly contested by thinkers like Robert Nozick, who argued that you can’t just give somebody something that was not asked for and then demand payment. Others who cautiously accept the principle still object that it doesn’t establish the degree of obligation created; if the government provides a public library, does that obligate you to fight and die in its wars?

That said, this is a very common form of legitimacy in smaller groups such as tribal bands; the chief sees that the tribe is fed, and demands obedience in return.

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In the real world, elements of all of these theories are usually at work. For example, you might obey the king because you believed he was blessed by the gods, but also because trying to overthrow him would lead to massive death and upheaval, and because he’s doing a good job at fostering commerce.

In your stories, you can judiciously emphasize any of these ideas as they mesh with the story you want to tell. Clarity on how a government justifies itself, and why its citizens might agree or disagree, will help you develop your story’s themes more strongly.