pressed by the supporters of rotten boroughs: once the people consent to a constitution,
they claim, democratic legitimacy forbids deviating from that constitution for any reason.
The line of argument to which Locke is responding therefore has relevance to
democracy in any time and place. If democracy is the foundation of legitimacy, there can
never be any legitimate deviation from a democratically legitimate constitution. If a
constitution malfunctions – even in a way that reduces its democratic representation of
the people – we must simply live with that malfunction, because no one has democratic
authority to change the constitution.
This may not seem like a pressing concern to us, especially when compared to the
opposite danger, which is that government will deviate from the constitution when it
shouldn’t. Once you have a democratically legitimate constitution, why would you want
to give people an excuse to deviate from it? But this problem only seems unimportant to
us because of the times we happen to live in – we now confront this type of constitutional
crisis less often than we used to. We have gotten better at preventing constitutional
malfunctions like rotten boroughs. Most importantly, we have adopted constitutions that
incorporate processes for changing the constitution. The constitutional crises we tend to
face are caused by disagreements over what the constitution says, not disagreements over
whether the constitution should be strictly adhered to in a given situation.
However, the infrequency with which we confront this kind of crisis in practice does
not remove the theoretical problem. An account of democratic legitimacy cannot be
satisfactory if it does not address this issue one way or the other. It would be implausible
to suggest that a serious controversy over whether to strictly follow the constitution in
some given situation would never occur again under any circumstances. We must either
agree with the defenders of rotten boroughs, saying that strict adherence to the
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