How should political leaders address the emerging climate crisis if citizens are reluctant to accept costly but necessary climate action? In this article, I address this question by harnessing insights from the realist tradition in political theory. I propose that the realist legitimacy framework provides action guidance by offering two broadly applicable heuristics for political agents: responsibility and responsiveness. These heuristics collide if citizens are unwilling to accept policies designed to secure a nation's long-term stability. Faced with this problem, some (...) authors make the supposedly realist argument that policymakers in liberal democracies should prioritise responsibility over responsiveness and embrace eco-authoritarianism to address the climate emergency. Against this line of argument, I maintain that the realist legitimacy framework entails no such commitment. Instead, realists must emphasise that responsible climate action entails a sufficient degree of responsiveness. I conclude by sketching how this insight may guide democratic leaders and climate activists in the future. (shrink)

Political realists exercise ideology critique to emancipate citizens from problematic beliefs concerning the legitimacy of their social order. They seek to unveil hidden conflict within apparent harmony. However, realists have so far neglected the opposite case in which erroneous beliefs delegitimise a social order, thus contributing to unrest and resentment. As a prototypical case for delegitimation, I will discuss the ‘big lie’ narrative that surrounds the 2020 presidential election in the United States. As I will argue, realist ideology critique is (...) currently underequipped to deal with these cases. To address this shortcoming, I propose a modification to the critical realist methodology. I will argue that realists should focus on unveiling self-serving, rather than merely self-justifying, political narratives. In line with a more practice-oriented approach to ideology critique, I will further sketch some implications for liberal democratic institutions that follow from taking delegitimation seriously. (shrink)

Liberal democracies face the challenge of elite capture. Mounting empirical evidence indicates that a small socioeconomic elite has vastly more influence on policy outcomes than ordinary citizens. In this essay, I explore how political reformers should address this issue by harnessing insights from the realist tradition in political theory. By placing empirics front and centre, I extrapolate two normative heuristics to guide democratic innovation. First, I maintain that reformers must increase the capacity of ordinary citizens to contest elite-biased political decisions—call (...) this editorial empowerment. Second, ordinary citizens must be vested with additional law-making capacity to offset elite bias—call this authorial empowerment. While institutional innovations to advance the editorial power of ordinary citizens have been central to the realist debate on democratic innovation, authorial empowerment has not received adequate consideration. To address this shortcoming, I explore institutional mechanisms aimed at increasing the authorial capacity of ordinary citizens and assess their alignment with the broader realist vision of a new mixed regime. (shrink)