Perfect Reasonings in Imperfect Worlds: Political Legitimacy in Practice

Political legitimacy is a foundational concept in democratic theory, yet grasping how it is experienced and made sense of requires empirical attention to how actors represent and justify their understandings of legitimacy. These representations are always mediated through discourse. When taken in isolation, approaches that treat legitimacy either as a fixed normative ideal derived from political theory or as a measurable attitude captured through surveys or trust indices are therefore limited. While such methods may register surface-level evaluations, they fail to reveal the implicit assumptions and background norms that inform judgments of legitimacy. A discursive epistemology, attentive to those underlying dimensions, is thus needed. Building on this premise, the paper conducts an in-depth discourse analysis of political and expert actors in Belgium during the COVID-19 crisis, drawing on a corpus of 2,000 items including tweets, newspaper articles, and parliamentary debates. Using a coding scheme informed by normative theories of democratic legitimacy, the study identifies the criteria that actors invoke when evaluating decisions, procedures, and decision-makers. It then analyzes how these expectations diverge from or distort normative theoretical ideals. The findings reveal several tensions between theory and practice: e.g., the marginalization of widely accepted democratic norms, the discursive prominence of legitimacy claims largely absent from standard theory, and the combinations of principles that cut across the clean distinctions assumed by ideal theories. By mapping and discussing these different types of divergences, the paper calls into question the “perfect reasonings” of normative theory and reorients it toward the realities of democratic practice. In doing so, it seeks to offer a nuanced answer to a broader and central question: what should normative theory do when confronted with empirical evidence that contradicts, complicates, or exceeds its claims?