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Types of Government Legitimacy

23 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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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.

Shame and War

19 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by in Politics for Worldbuilders, War, Writing

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In our supposedly enlightened era, many people would like to imagine that most wars are fought for essentially rational purposes: punishing terrorists, seizing resources, profiteering off of arms sales, and so on. In centuries past, of course, kings and princes would fight wars to avenge personal insult or for self-aggrandizement. But surely we don’t do that sort of thing today? Surely entire countries don’t burn with humiliated resentment and seek revenge?

If only. Countries are collections of people, after all. And emotions still play a significant role in decisions to go to war. In some cases, they may play the decisive role. And fantasy or sci-fi authors would do well to keep this point in mind. As I have noted before, we are apt to forget that people have many reasons to go to war.

I am nearly finished reading Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War, by sociologist Thomas J. Scheff. (Despite the piffle that infests the field, there are occasionally good works of scholarship by sociologists to be found!) He argues convincingly that in recent decades, much of American academia has been improperly deemphasizing the role of emotion in war, and in society generally. (This is, he claims, part of the move by advancing “civilization” to suppress and delegitimize emotions as justifications for behavior. I wonder what Dr. Scheff would say about the late effervescence of “safetyism.”)

Somewhat less convincingly, Scheff argues that many if not most wars are motivated by suppressed shame, acted out in a dysfunctional international system that mimics a dysfunctional family system in many respects. He argues from the assumption that if national interest were the only issue in a conflict between countries, people are creative enough to work out compromises that are, at any rate, not as bad as the wholesale destructiveness of total war.

Why fight wars then? Scheff argues that the emotion of shame (and probably fear as well, though it is not his focus) leads to alienation between the conflicting sides when it is suppressed and unacknowledged—and also within a country, so that citizens subordinate their own selves to the false solidarity of nationalism, to the extent that they are willing to fight and die in the military (which Scheff calls engulfment). It is this alienation, and the rage erupting out of unacknowledged shame, that leads countries to desire vengeance and fight wars with each other, rather than working out their conflicts less destructively.

Scheff argues that France’s shame at losing Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 was one of the key preconditions of World War I, and motivated French policies that played a key role in triggering the conflict—in particular, its alliance with Russia against Germany, which encouraged Russia to foment trouble in the Balkans. Germany’s own belligerence was, therefore, (partly) motivated by a rational fear of France’s intrigues. He also draws parallels between the secret intrigues of France, Russia, and Britain—each of which kept preparations for war secret from their own peoples, and in some cases even from much of their own governments—to the “triangling” and intrigues to be found in dysfunctional families. Finally, Scheff endorses the standard position that World War II was in large part motivated by Germany’s humiliation in Versailles and consequent desire for revenge, though he adds several lurid details of the psychology of Adolf Hitler in particular.

Scheff nearly falls into the trap of reducing everything to a single variable. He does periodically note that clashes of interests, rational fears, and the like still play a role in decisions to make war; but his foundational assumption that people would naturally come up with solutions to conflict, if not for their emotional commitments, impels him to the conclusion that if only countries would acknowledge their shame and work through their issues, wars would all but disappear.

This conclusion, however, is based on Scheff’s unstated assumption that both parties always assume that war is not something desirable, in the absence of humiliation and rage, or some other “problem” or “conflict” to be resolved. But in some cases, war is simply something that a society does. For example, while the Mongol campaigns against China and the neighboring Muslim sultanates seem motivated partly by the desire to eliminate ongoing threats, the invasion of Kievan Rus was completely unprovoked. The Rus write that the Mongols were unknown to them before their sudden invasion.

In general, Scheff neglects a country’s strategic culture, the way it understands the world and the role of war in such a world. If one “civilized” country goes through a soul-searching process of airing grievances and working through its emotions, and another “warlike” country simply perceives the first country as weaklings who are ripe for conquest, acknowledging shame is more likely to encourage war than to prevent it.

Still, Scheff’s book is an important reminder that emotions in their rawest form, cloaked as they may be in the language of national interest or international justice, often play a role in war. Worldbuilders should keep this in mind, as shame and fear can be powerful tools in the worldbuilding toolbox.

Internal Discipline in Rebel Movements, Part II

22 Saturday Jul 2023

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Revolution, State Formation, War, Writing

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In a previous post, I discussed the theory of Jeremy Weinstein on why some rebel groups act in a relatively restrained manner towards civilians, while other groups engage in indiscriminate violence. He argued that much of the difference stemmed from the initial resources available to the group, and how that affected the incentives of people to join the rebels. Poor groups were forced by circumstance to become “activist” groups, that is, to appeal to a base of civilian support and to recruit personnel who were “investors,” i.e. willing to endure short-term sacrifices for the sake of the group’s long-term goals. In order to do that, activist groups were forced to maintain strong discipline to convince the civilian populace that it would protect them from abuses by its soldiers. Poor groups that failed to do so soon withered away from lack of recruits or food.

By contrast, groups that began with access to money and guns from external sponsors, or from control over valuable resources such as drugs or gems, lacked the strategic imperative to seek civilian support. Moreover, they had a strong incentive to expand their membership by offering high pay or other benefits, and therefore attracted “consumer” members, those seeking short-term benefits that flowed from their membership in the rebel group. Groups largely made up of consumers had a much harder time preventing abuse of civilians, since their members were prone to looting or to abducting civilian women or murdering people they disliked for personal reasons. And such groups also had fewer reasons to impose strong discipline: because they had independent resources, they suffered few (initial) disadvantages from tolerating abuses of civilians.

In this post, we will continue Weinstein’s argument and examine the consequences of the previous paragraphs for rebel groups’ governance of civilian areas.

As rebel groups gain control over territory, they have to decide how to handle the civilians living there. Civilians can provide useful resources to rebel groups: information about government activity, new recruits, food, and tax revenue. However, civilians are strategic actors: they can choose to support the rebels or the government, and if neither option seems attractive they will try to flee the area entirely or to resist both sides.

Rebel groups have options in how to build governance structures in response. These can be said to vary on two factors: inclusiveness (AKA participation) and the extent of power sharing. (This is true of regime governments as well, which is not surprising since a rebel group administering territory is basically a kind of government.) A participatory governance regime tries to address the preferences and needs of the populace, while a non-participatory regime treats civilians with indifference at best, as targets of predation at worst. But even participatory governments need not actually share power over decision making, a tempting option in wartime. However, the more that a rebel group shares real power with civilians, the more that civilians will trust the group (or the government in similar circumstances) to uphold its bargains in the future. And in response, rebel groups that build participatory structures of true power sharing are likely to elicit more cooperation from civilian populaces.

Why then doesn’t everybody build such structures? Weinstein argues that the difference hinges on three factors (though he subdivides the factors somewhat differently on pages 171 and 196 of his book without tying the differences to his findings—tsk tsk, Cambridge University Press editors!):

  1. The degree to which the rebel group needs support from the populace;
  2. The extent to which extracting resources from the populace is dependent on civilian productivity; and
  3. The time horizons of the group’s members (i.e. whether they are predominantly “investors” or “consumers”), and the resulting ability of the group to make credible commitments to the populace.

A group that has significant starting resources needs the support of the populace less if at all, and will tend as a result to build non-participatory structures that do not share power. This tendency is exacerbated by the short-term orientation of its members, who want to plunder the populace and seize loot. Even the need to get food from the populace will not moderate this tendency much, since civilians cannot simply stop growing food and will therefore usually have food available to seize.

One complicating wrinkle occurs when the group can extract valuable resources from the populace, but only if the people commit their work to generating such resources. For example, the Shining Path in the Upper Huallaga Valley gained most of their revenue from the drug trade, but they therefore depended on civilians to grow coca. Out of self-interest, then, the rebels built structures that were responsive to civilian interest in having a predictable market for coca leaves, charging fixed taxes and administering public markets. (We would describe the resulting governance structure as inclusive but not featuring true power sharing.) 

A rebel group in this situation could instead choose to enslave civilians en masse, and some try, but this tends to result in civilians fleeing the area or throwing their support to the government in response. Still, the short-term orientation of group members tends to cause the breakdown of the inclusive structures over time, as individual members steal opportunistically. As a result, even non-activist groups that try to take the interests of civilians into account for selfish purposes often fall back on control by force.

An activist rebel group, on the other hand, is dependent on the support of the civilian populace for its very survival. As a result, it will prize the cooperation of civilians, and will tend to create governance structures that both are participatory and share true power, so that civilians will trust them to uphold their bargains. Because activist groups are largely made up of members with longer time horizons (i.e. patient “investors”), the members will submit to such checks on their power for the sake of the group’s strategic goals.

In later posts, we will discuss rebel groups’ strategic use of violence against civilians, and their ability to sustain their membership over time.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned fourth book in this series, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)