Popular Legitimacy

The American and French Revolutions derived from—and promoted—a concept of legitimacy based on popular consent and the public will. This concept displaced the practice of relying on dynasticism, the prescriptive rights of hereditary monarchs. As a result, plebiscites have taken the place of dynastic marriages as mechanisms for the legitimization of transfers of sovereignty. Noteworthy examples include decisions in the unification of Italy and in the European settlement of 1919–1920. Plebiscites have not, however, been conducted when Great Powers have ruled them out—for instance, France’s rejection of a plebiscite concerning Alsace-Lorraine after the First World War. Popular legitimacy raises questions about the defining characteristics of a self-governing nation—its size and capacity for self-defence, its language and history, and the allegiance choices of its citizens. Disputes over minority rights may raise questions about national identity and cohesion, including the possible founding of new states seceding from established countries. In some cases, such as Israel, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, religion is a fundamental source of identity and state legitimacy.

The Imam of the Christians

This book examines how Christian leaders adopted and adapted the political practices and ideas of their Muslim rulers between 750 and 850 in the Abbasid caliphate in the Jazira (modern eastern Turkey and northern Syria). Focusing on the writings of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, the patriarch of the Jacobite church, the book describes how this encounter produced an Islamicate Christianity that differed from the Christianities of Byzantium and western Europe in far more than just theology. In doing so, the book opens a new window on the world of early Islam and Muslims' interactions with other religious communities. The book shows how Dionysius and other Christian clerics, by forging close ties with Muslim elites, were able to command greater power over their coreligionists, such as the right to issue canons regulating the lives of lay people, gather tithes, and use state troops to arrest opponents. In his writings, Dionysius advertises his ease in the courts of ʿAbd Allah ibn Tahir in Raqqa and the caliph al-Ma'mun in Baghdad, presenting himself as an effective advocate for the interests of his fellow Christians because of his knowledge of Arabic and his ability to redeploy Islamic ideas to his own advantage. Strikingly, Dionysius even claims that, like al-Ma'mun, he is an imam since he leads his people in prayer and rules them by popular consent. A wide-ranging examination of Middle Eastern Christian life during a critical period in the development of Islam, the book is also a case study of the surprising workings of cultural and religious adaptation.

Bill of Rights

This chapter examines Article II of the Oklahoma constitution. Compared with other states in existence when Oklahoma’s constitution was written, Oklahoma’s contained a moderate list of rights. With few exceptions, these rights are similar, if not identical, to those found in the U.S. Constitution. The first two sections are theoretical statements concerning the role of government. These express ideas similar to those found in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, Sections 1 and 2 explicitly recognize that the government is founded on popular consent and may be changed when the people consent to such changes. Among the “rights” not in the U.S. Constitution are: prohibition of imprisonment for debt; indictment by information; procedures for punishing for contempt; and regulations concerning the availability of corporate records to public inspection.

As time goes by, the same sentiments apply? Stability of voter satisfaction with democracy during the electoral cycle in 31 countries

Popular consent is an essential element for success and stability of democracies. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that “electoral winners” (i.e. voters casting a ballot for government parties) are more satisfied with democracy than supporters of the opposition parties. However, little is known about the dynamics of satisfaction during the electoral cycle: Do winners become happier and losers even more discontent over time? We approach this question by utilizing an interview date in the European Social Survey (rounds 1–8) to position individuals within the different stages of electoral cycle. The results based on 199,207 responses from 199 surveys in 31 countries suggest that satisfaction with democracy stays relatively stable during the electoral cycle across various electoral systems if the political development is predictable. However, if actions of the parties are uncertain, namely the alternations of governments tend to be frequent, partial, and opened to all parties, and hence neither winners nor losers know how steady their status is with respect to the political development in the country, their satisfaction tend to fluctuate over time. Therefore, the conclusion reached is the more stable West European democracies have limited generalizability to the low-predictable systems in Central and Eastern Europe.

Petitioning for empire in Napoleonic Europe

Petitions, loyal addresses, plebiscites, and other displays of popular consent accompanied most episodes of the revolutionary and Napoleonic expansion of France between 1789 and 1814. Petitioning had been adapted and transformed in France during the revolution, through which it became associated to popular sovereignty. Historians have often studied popular mobilisation through the prism of the conquest of rights, thereby pitting subordinate groups against entrenched ruling classes. This article surveys a different development, as French revolutionary administrators and generals, and Napoleon himself, adapted and reconfigured petitioning as a top-down tool for territorial expansion and empire-building, using it to invoke the supposed popular acquiescence to their reconfiguration of the political map of Europe. French propaganda portrayed these initiatives within the same interpretative framework that discussed the value of other, more autonomous, petitions. This work will thus analyse the paradox of top-down-controlled mobilisations that, at the same time, reinforced the symbolic pre-eminence of popular consent and participation.

The Dilemma of Balancing Growth and Social Justice

At Independence in 1947, India emerged from a century and half of economic stagnation, a radicalized and land-hungry peasantry, chronic food deficit and the spectre of mass starvation and famine looming over parts of the country. Faced with similar challenges, post-war ‘developmental states’ followed the course of economic development based on a template of state-controlled economic designs for growth, investment and trade. However, despite the challenge of resettling millions of refugees following the bloody partition of the country, war against Pakistan, and a violent peasant uprising in the South, the government of India, under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, decided to open up all aspects of politics to democratic consultation. Many specialists of the time, including Barrington Moore and Gunnar Myrdal considered a ‘soft-state’, whose power and legitimacy derived from popular consent, to be ill-equipped to take hard decisions such as land reforms, and industrial growth. Contrary to such pessimistic prognoses, India has held together as a strong, stable, emerging economy. One can infer the strength and ingenuity of the Indian model in meeting the twin imperative of growth and justice from the steady growth of Indian economy and democratic consolidation over the past seven decades since Independence.

Popular Consent and the European Order

New ideas about how people should relate to power played out in relations between as well as within states. The French revolution promoted rights of self-determination, and devices (later termed plebiscites) for legitimating both new regimes and transfers of territories. Napoleon further instrumentalized, then abandoned, such practices. His enemies criticized his pursuit of ‘conquest’—but thereby raised questions about their own habits. After the wars, fuzzier notions of consent featured in discourses around ‘legitimacy’. Revolutions, which continued to be employed to constitute would-be-lawful regimes, tested prevailing ideas. In the Ottoman world, instruments that could be conceptualized as constitutions played a part in negotiations around overlordship. From the 1850s, plebiscites came back into use, alongside other means of registering consent to boundary change. Increasing involvement of European powers in attempts to resolve conflicts within Ottoman domains (thus Mount Lebanon, Crete) encouraged cross-fertilization between what were in some ways already convergent practices.