Some Social Requisites of Democracy

In what has become the single most cited article ever published in the American Political Science Review, a classic 1959 article by Seymour Martin Lipset, he wrote “Legitimacy involves the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate or proper ones for the society.”

He saw legitimacy as a substitute for effectiveness, since “the degree of legitimacy of a democratic system may affect its capacity to survive the crises of effectiveness, such as depressions or lost wars.”

In Lipset’s formulation, effectiveness didn’t confer legitimacy on a government. Effectiveness helped a government stay in power without it. The whole idea of “performance legitimacy” is nothing more than “effectiveness” with a little extra dignity. Writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, Lipset couldn’t very well have said that Nazi rule was legitimated by Germany’s strong economic performance in the 1930s—even if, for many admirers of Germany at the time, it was. But with the passage of time, legitimacy became a less loaded word. Cold Warriors thought Soviet rule illegitimate in occupied countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but perhaps less so in Russia itself. In the era of decolonization, many developing countries established quite unsavory forms of government, but it may have seemed disrespectful (or even racist) to question their legitimacy. Performance legitimacy was a way to let non-Western dictatorships off the democratic hook, so long as they delivered the goods.

Reeling from the 1989 challenge in Tiananmen Square and desperate to restore its legitimacy in the eyes of the world, the CCP of the 1990s was ripe for the idea. It went after performance legitimacy with a vengeance. It even turned the idea on its own people. By the early 2000s, it was becoming increasingly difficult to inspire patriotism by trotting out ninety-year-old veterans of the Long March, and appeals to Marxism-Leninism were clearly farcical. The CCP needed something new, and it found it in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 Shanghai Expo and endless economic growth. Perhaps egged on by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Fogel’s 2007 prediction that, by 2040, China would reach a GDP per capita of $85,000—and that was $85,000 in year 2000 dollars, equivalent to $127,000 today—China’s leader Hu Jintao wrote the goal of “building a moderately prosperous society” right into the CCP constitution. It remains there to this day.