Page - 79 - in Austrian Law Journal, Volume 1/2015

ALJ 1/2015 Authoritarian Liberalism 79 representative assemblies that retain the right to question, to demand justifications, to remove officers, to dismiss governments and to give instructions in the form of laws. From this perspec- tive, democracy is the suspension of judgement substitution. The delegate retains the full power to revoke obedience in one or the other instance. Authoritarian pretensions can be undone in processes of public debate as soon as the delegate is drawn into the forum of politics. VIII. Output legitimacy Generally, trusting is not unreasonable if it is complemented with a modicum of distrust. The infusion of misgivings, however, must not lead to permanent interference with the delegate’s judgment. This would undermine the very purpose of delegation. In other words, the delegator must never behave as a meddlesome busybody.81 She may only retain, for example, the power to change the team periodically depending on how well or how badly it has served her interests during a period of stewardship. The basic justification of delegation is, then, accomplishments or, in the words of Scharpf, “output legitimacy”.82 Patrons fill out the customer satisfaction form after having received the service. There is nothing political about the exercise of delegated authority. It is not the type of authority that accrues from acting together under conditions of plurality.83 Delegation is an essentially “private” affair. The legitimacy of delegated acts depends upon accomplishments. It is immaterial whether what is accomplished benefits a monarch, a priesthood, a democratic polity or a private person. It is not entirely accurate, therefore, to speak, as Scharpf does, of democratic “output legitimacy”. In the context of delegation, there is only “output legitimacy”, from which a variety of entities can benefit, be these theocracies or pagan princes. When it comes to delegations, democratic legitimacy extends only to the recognition of defec- tiveness and to the choice to fix it. It is not “conferred”, as if it were a title, to the organ acting as the delegate. The source of legitimacy of bodies with delegated powers is that obedience is good for those choosing to obey them. But the sheer fact that the obedient are a democratic polity does not invest the delegates with democratic legitimacy. In the literature, to be sure, one frequently encounters the claim that bodies such as central banks or even courts enhance democracy because they help to represent and to protect the dif- fuse interests of consumers against the influence of special interest groups.84 If accepted, this claim would have us believe that with regard to their limited task the democratic credentials of these bodies are superior to those of elected assemblies. What is insinuated, thereby, is that democratic representation is tantamount to aggregating preferences in order to guarantee their satisfaction.85 Of course, if such an aggregative function could be performed by one exceptionally sympathetic individual—the president, for example—then delegating this task to this one indi- 81 This explains why the usual principal-agents models of delegation do not fit our framework. 82 See, for example, FRITZ SCHARPF, GOVERNING EUROPE: EFFECTIVE AND DEMOCRATIC? (Oxford University Press, 1999). 83 Yes, Hannah Arendt sends her greetings here. 84 For a prominent example, see Robert Keohane, Steven Macedo & Andrew Moravcsik, Democracy-Enhancing Multilateralism, 63 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION 1, 6, 10, 24 (2009). 85 In the article cited in note 84, at 10, the basic assumption appears to be that democracy ought to maximize economic rationality for the greater good.