The democratic legitimacy hierarchy. The scales to determine authorities's legitimacy in democratic states

Abstract

The distortion in states' hierarchies causes discussions of legitimacy in inter-institutional and internal relations. The reason of this is the parts of hierarchy that aren't organized according to democratic legitimacy. The purpose of this study is to explain what the democratic legitimacy hierarchy is, how to establish and protect it. Through various visuals, it is specified who should be at the levels of hierarchy, and methods are proposed on how to renew the system if there are people who shouldn't be in those levels. Solution proposals are presented on how to prevent the crimes of authority encroachment that can be experienced in inter-level relations following the placement of legitimate people to the levels. Emphasizing that the main form of democracy is direct democracy, stating that implementation of democratic legitimacy hierarchy system is the first step to reach it, tips on how to progress to reach it in the next stages are given.

Keywords

• democratic legitimacy
• representative democracy
• authority encroachment
• principal-agent relation
• theory of democracy