What makes power legitimate in a pluralistic society?

 

 Conflict, Power, and the Need for Correctable Institutions

Conflict, power, and social asymmetry are not accidental disturbances of pluralistic societies. They are constitutive dimensions of social life. Individuals and groups hold different interests, values, identities, historical experiences, and interpretations of justice. These differences inevitably generate tensions over resources, recognition, political authority, and collective meaning.

Four concepts provide the analytical foundation[1]:

• Conflict occurs when actors pursue incompatible interests, values, or interpretations of social reality.
• Power is the capacity to influence decisions, institutions, behavior, and dominant interpretations.
• Social asymmetry consists of structural differences in access to resources, knowledge, legitimacy, recognition, and institutional influence.
• Correctability is the capacity of institutions to expose power to criticism, recognize mistakes, reverse abuse, repair harm, and revise decisions.

Conflict must be distinguished from tension, dispute, and violence. Tensions are often latent, while disputes are limited disagreements that can usually be addressed through existing procedures. Conflict concerns more persistent disagreements involving interests, identities, power, or normative claims. Violence is not the essence of conflict but one possible form of escalation when institutional and communicative mechanisms fail or are deliberately destroyed[2].

The political challenge is therefore not to eliminate conflict. Attempts to impose complete harmony often suppress dissent and concentrate power. Democratic societies should instead transform antagonism between enemies into legitimate contestation among opponents who continue to recognize one another as members of a shared political order[3].

Conflict can have constructive effects. It reveals hidden inequalities, makes excluded experiences visible, tests institutional legitimacy, and can initiate reform. It becomes destructive when it produces violence, dehumanization, permanent exclusion, or relations of domination that cannot be challenged[4].

Conflicts are simultaneously material, institutional, symbolic, narrative, and emotional. Groups compete not only over income, property, or political authority, but also over whose interpretation of history, identity, justice, and responsibility becomes dominant. Fear, humiliation, resentment, and perceived injustice can intensify conflict, while recognition, empathy, and shared grief can create opportunities for transformation.

Social asymmetries are unavoidable in complex societies. Differences in expertise, responsibility, authority, and organizational position can serve legitimate functions. An asymmetry is easier to justify when it serves a defined function, rests on relevant competence or democratic authorization, is limited in scope and duration, remains transparent, and can be challenged by the person subject to it. It becomes suspected when authority extends beyond its purpose, dependence prevents refusal, affected people lack information or remedy, benefits flow persistently upward, or the powerful actor can define both the rule and the evidence of compliance. These questions apply to teachers, physicians, employers, regulators, platforms, courts, and governments, although the appropriate safeguards differ. Asymmetry becomes domination when power is structurally concentrated, dependence becomes one-sided, affected groups cannot contest decisions, and effective countervailing institutions are absent.

Power should not be understood only as direct coercion[5]. It also operates through institutions, classifications, professional knowledge, cultural norms, and narratives. It determines which problems enter the political agenda, which groups are seen as credible, and which identities are treated as normal, dangerous, or deviant. Symbolic power can make historically produced hierarchies appear natural or deserved.

Power is also productive: it helps create institutions, identities, knowledge systems, and forms of social coordination[6]. Complex societies require authority and collective decision-making. The existence of power is therefore not illegitimate. The decisive question is how power is produced, distributed, justified, contested, and corrected.

Economic, racial, colonial, patriarchal, and geopolitical asymmetries affect who can participate in conflict and whose claims receive recognition. Formal equality is insufficient when some groups lack the material resources, cultural status, or institutional access required for effective participation. Legitimate institutions must therefore address both formal procedures and the structural inequalities that shape them[7].

Legitimacy must be distinguished from acceptance, legality, and justice. People may accept a regime through habit, fear, or lack of alternatives. A decision may comply with existing law while remaining unjust or publicly indefensible. Legitimacy concerns whether an institution can justifiably claim recognition and obedience within an order that those affected can meaningfully contest.

Legitimacy has several dimensions. Procedures must be consistent and publicly defensible. Outcomes must respect fundamental rights and protection against arbitrariness. Institutions must recognize citizens as participants rather than merely objects of administration. Most importantly, the institutional order must remain capable of correcting itself[8].

Correctability is broader than accountability, responsiveness, or adaptability. Accountability requires explanation and responsibility; responsiveness requires sensitivity to public needs; adaptability requires adjustment to changing circumstances. Correctability includes all three but also requires the actual capacity to reverse abuse, repair harm, address structural inequality, and change institutional direction[9].

Legitimate power therefore requires[10]:

• Transparency: decisions and responsibilities must be visible, understandable, and usable for public scrutiny.
• Pluralistic control: courts, legislatures, media, regulators, science, opposition parties, and civil society must be able to check one another.
• Proportionality: intervention must not exceed what is necessary to achieve a legitimate purpose.
• Inclusive participation: affected groups, including marginalized communities, must possess real opportunities to influence decisions.
• Effective correction: complaint, appeal, review, restoration, and policy revision must produce genuine institutional consequences.
• Structural justice: institutions must be capable of correcting enduring economic, racial, gendered, colonial, and intergenerational inequalities.

These criteria must be assessed in practice rather than through formal appearance alone. Courts can exist without independence, participation can be symbolic, transparency can overwhelm citizens with unusable information, and accountability procedures can leave underlying concentrations of power untouched[11]. The language of good governance itself can be used to legitimize an unequal order.

Emergency power presents the sharpest test. War, pandemics, terrorism, financial collapse, natural disasters, and ecological crises may require temporary powers that would be unacceptable under normal circumstances. Such powers are defined by exceptional threats, expanded executive authority, and a claim to necessity and temporariness.

Emergency measures are not automatically authoritarian. Authoritarianism begins when exceptional powers escape review, become normalized, or expand into ordinary governance[12]. Surveillance, preventive detention, movement restrictions, risk profiling, and control over digital communication may persist after the original crisis has passed[13].

Emergency power also affects groups unequally. Measures may impose disproportionate burdens on caregivers, informal workers, minorities, migrants, or populations already exposed to insecurity. Crisis governance must therefore be assessed not only through formal legality but also through its distribution of protection, vulnerability, and sacrifice.

Correctable emergency power requires clear time limits, legislative oversight, independent judicial review, public transparency, repeated justification, and accessible procedures for objection and redress. Measures must be necessary, proportionate, non-discriminatory, and reversible. Crisis must not become a permanent justification for surveillance, technocratic control, or suppression of opposition.

Ecological emergencies create a particular dilemma. Rapid collective action may be necessary to protect planetary conditions, but urgency can also be used to bypass democracy and impose socially unequal burdens. Ecological effectiveness must therefore remain connected to participation, justice, and institutional review.

Conflict regulation should not be reduced to maintain order. It must keep conflicts visible, contestable, and potentially transformative while preventing violence and domination. A stable but deeply unequal society may merely suppress conflict rather than resolve its causes.

Correctable conflict regulation operates through several interconnected domains:

• Legal mechanisms provide courts, appeals, mediation, constitutional protection, and restorative justice.
• Political mechanisms provide elections, parliamentary debate, negotiation, representation, and public hearings.
• Social mechanisms include unions, social movements, religious organizations, citizen groups, and local communities.
• Communicative mechanisms include education, journalism, public culture, and digital networks through which conflicts are interpreted.

These domains must provide mutual oversight. Conflict regulation loses legitimacy when dominant actors monopolize the language, agenda, procedures, or definition of acceptable outcomes. Participation must therefore be substantive rather than merely formal.

Conflict regulation should also address structural and cultural violence[14]. Economic marginalization, racial exclusion, institutional humiliation, and systematic legal disadvantage may persist beneath a surface of order. Genuine correction may require redistribution, recognition, institutional redesign, or broader social transformation rather than improved management alone.

Global conflict regulation faces similar difficulties. International law, courts, multilateral organizations, and human-rights regimes can constrain violence, but their authority is weakened when rules are applied selectively, or powerful states remain effectively beyond correction. The international order loses credibility when law formally survives but enforcement depends on geopolitical status.

Digital platforms have become another site of power and conflict regulation. Algorithms influence which information becomes visible, which narratives spread, and who gains public attention. Content moderation and fact-checking may reduce harm, but they also create risks of censorship and unaccountable private authority. Digital correctability requires transparent rules, auditable decisions, independent appeals, and public oversight of platform power.

Several contemporary dynamics threaten correctable institutions. Populism can reveal genuine failures of representation but becomes dangerous when one movement claims exclusive ownership of “the people” and delegitimizes courts, media, opposition, or minority rights[15]. Technocracy becomes problematic when political choices are presented as neutral technical necessities and removed from democratic debate.

Populism and technocracy are mirror-image risks. The former may replace pluralism with an exclusive popular will; the latter may replace political contestation with expert management. Both can weaken correctability by suppressing legitimate disagreement.

Economic concentration and platform power create further obstacles. Wealthy actors can influence policy, media, knowledge production, and public agendas without proportional democratic accountability[16]. Formal political participation has limited value when private concentrations of power determine the actual range of available choices.

Correctability may be severely constrained or absent under authoritarianism, war, extreme polarization, economic domination, weakened courts, controlled media, or digital manipulation. It should therefore not be treated as an automatic feature of modern institutions. It is a political and institutional achievement that must be continually maintained and defended.

A framework for evaluating societies should consequently examine more than wealth, formal rights, or administrative effectiveness. Relevant indicators include:

• actual access to courts, complaint procedures, and political decision-making.
• independence of oversight institutions and media.
• substantive participation by minorities and marginalized groups.
• clarity and accessibility of information about power.
• institutional responsiveness, repair, and reversal of harmful decisions.
• capacity to correct structural inequalities and historical asymmetries.

Conflict itself is not necessarily evidence of social failure. It can signal that injustice or exclusion has finally become visible. The more important question is whether institutions allow conflict to be expressed and transformed without violence, domination, or permanent exclusion.

Correctable institutions create the social conditions in which people can participate as co-authors of a shared order. They support human development by protecting recognition, safety, criticism, and open communication. When institutions lose the ability to revise themselves, social order hardens into domination, technocratic management, or exclusion.

The normative quality of a political order therefore depends not on the absence of conflict or power, but on whether conflict remains visible and transformable and whether power remains limited, contestable, reversible, and capable of repair[17]. Correctability connects power to legitimacy by ensuring that no institution or actor becomes permanently immune to criticism and revision.

 

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[1] Robert A. Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science 2, no. 3 (1957): 201–215, https://doi.org/10.1002/bs.3830020303; Lukes, Power: A Radical View; Foucault, Power/Knowledge. “Correctability” in its full multi-dimensional sense is the author’s institutional principle.

[2] Lewis A. Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1956); Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–191, https://doi.org/10.1177/002234336900600301.

[3] Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013); Habermas, Between Facts and Norms. These represent different theories of democratic conflict and should not be presented as fully compatible.

[4] Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict; Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Conflict can be productive under some institutional conditions; it also carries real risks and costs.

[5] Foucault, Power/Knowledge; Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity, 1991); Fricker, Epistemic Injustice.

[6] Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Foucault, Power/Knowledge. The legitimacy of authority is a separate normative question from the descriptive existence of power.

[7] Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition?”; Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.”

[8] Weber, Economy and Society; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms; Forst, The Right to Justification. These sources supply different sociological and normative conceptions of legitimacy.

[9] Guillermo O’Donnell, “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies,” Journal of Democracy 9, no. 3 (1998): 112–126, https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.1998.0053; Mark Bovens, “Analysing and Assessing Accountability,” European Law Journal 13, no. 4 (2007): 447–468, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2007.00378.x. The broader concept of correctability is the author’s extension.

[10] O’Donnell, “Horizontal Accountability”; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms; Young, Inclusion and Democracy; Barak, Proportionality. The six-part list is a synthetic institutional standard rather than a single established doctrine.

[11] Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq, How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Nancy Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 1 (2016): 5–19, https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2016.0012.

[12] Oren Gross and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Law in Times of Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); David Dyzenhaus, The Constitution of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Emergency regimes differ significantly; the text should avoid suggesting that exceptional measures invariably persist.

[13] Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms; Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States.”

[14] Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research”; Young, Responsibility for Justice; Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition?” Structural disadvantage requires empirical specification rather than being inferred solely from unequal outcomes.

[15] Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Frank Fischer, Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990). Not every appeal to popular sovereignty is anti-pluralist, and not every use of expertise is technocratic.

[16] Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, “Persistence of Power, Elites, and Institutions,” American Economic Review 98, no. 1 (2008): 267–293, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.98.1.267; Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564–581, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595. The latter evidence is specific to the United States.

[17] Pettit, Republicanism; Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); O’Donnell, “Horizontal Accountability.”