%0 Journal Article
%T Nonideal democratic authority:  The case of undemocratic elections
%A Alexander S Kirshner
%J Politics, Philosophy & Economics
%@ 1741-3060
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/1470594X17732068
%X Empirical research has transformed our understanding of autocratic institutions (Gandhi, 2008; Magaloni, 2006; Schedler, 2009). Yet democratic theorists remain laser-focused on ideal democracies, often contending that political equality is necessary to generate democratic authority (Buchanan, 2002; Christiano, 2008; Estlund, 2008; Kolodny, 2014B; Shapiro, 2002; Viehoff, 2014B, Waldron, 1999). Those analyses neglect most nonideal democracies and autocracies ¨C regimes featuring inequality and practices like gerrymandering. This essay fills that fundamental gap, outlining the difficulties of applying theories of democratic authority to nonideal regimes and challenging long-standing views about democratic authority. Focusing on autocrats that lose elections (for example, Sri Lanka, 2015), I outline the democratic authority of nonideal, flawed procedures. Flawed elections are unjustifiably biased toward incumbents. But under certain conditions, ignoring an incumbent¡¯s loss would require not treating one¡¯s fellow citizens as equals. Under those conditions, therefore, citizens are bound to obey those electoral outcomes ¨C that is, flawed procedures can possess democratic authority
%K democratic authority
%K nonideal theory
%K flawed elections
%K autocracy
%K nondemocratic institutions
%K gerrymandering
%K inequality
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1470594X17732068