Democracy versus Security as Standards of Political Legitimacy: The Case of National Policy on Irregular Migrant Arrivals

Abstract

Democratic citizens confront a range of problems framed as security issues, in policy areas such as counterterrorism and migration control, which place substantial political pressure on democratic norms. We develop a normative theoretical framework for assessing whether and how policies that curtail democratic governance standards in the name of security can be justified as politically legitimate. To do so, we articulate a novel normative account of legitimacy, which integrates insights from both democratic and realist traditions of thought to illuminate the complementary contributions of democratic and security standards to political legitimacy. We further elaborate a framework for applying..