|
|
|
|
|
|
CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED
Consent of the governed is a political theory that says a government's legitimacy and moral right to use state power is, or ought to be, derived from the people or society over which that power is exercised. This theory of "consent" is historically contrasted to the divine right of kings and has often been invoked against the legitimacy of colonialism. Following John Locke's notion of a nation of "free and equal" citizens, the Founders of the United States believed that consent of the governed was the only legitimate basis upon which one "free and equal" citizen could exercise legal authority over another -- otherwise neither equal could overcome the other.
The United States was the first nation of modern times to break away from the colonial rule of a distant monarch by invoking "consent of the governed" as a right in the United States Declaration of Independence. Today, consent of the governed is a presumptive aspect of all democracies. Indeed, any government that cannot plausibly claim to rule by consent of the governed tends not to enjoy the benefit of the doubt about their legitimacy, either by their own people or the peoples of other nations.
A more theoretical, if less constrained, approach to the "consent" doctrine relies on the notion of a social contract between the government and the people. In a modern democracy, few, if any, of "the people" have an opportunity to actually consent to such a "contract." However, a proponent of government legitimacy under this theory would contend that each adult implicitly provides their consent by remaining in their country of birth versus emigrating, and those who immigrate indicate their consent by explicitly agreeing to abide by the constitutional or statutory laws of the country that allows their entry. By this logic, consent of the governed is a presumed fact for any government that does not restrict emigration.
A more satisfying particularization of consent of the governed is that it is obtained through the practice of regular elections that feature broad or universal suffrage (i.e., rights to vote). That some choose not to vote would not prevent the People as a whole, via majority rule, from establishing their consent via elections, just as the existence of Representatives elected by the People does not mean the laws approved by the Representatives are invalid. Under this approach, the government must come before the People for continuing authority at each election and establish through open and transparent checks and balances that it has achieved the right to exercise authority in a fair and incontestable manner.
The Founders also thought consent of the governed to be conditional, in that there are certain things that the government just can't do, when they are against the interests of the People themselves such that it could not be reasonably deemed that the People had consented to it.
See also
References
- Etienne de La Boétie, Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
- Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997 (in which he argues, against a theory of the consent of the governed, in favour of a theory of the lack of explicit rebellion; following a Popperian view on falsifiability, Pettit considers that as consent of the governed is always implicitly supposed, thus trapping the social contract in a vicious circle, it should be replaced by the lack of explicit rebellion.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|