The ethical foundations of democratic legitimacy are the moral principles and intellectual conditions that give democratic governance its authority beyond mere procedural function.

While elections, laws, and institutions are integral to any democratic system, they don’t make the system legitimate. The West glorifies democracy because, in theory, it’s self-ruled by autonomous, rational citizens. To be legitimate in this sense, a government must reflect not only the will of the people, but the considered and informed will of the people.

To understand this legitimacy, we must understand deliberation. 

Deliberation allows individuals to consider competing perspectives, evidence, and arguments. As Jürgen Habermas argues, laws and policies are only legitimate when citizens properly deliberate on them. The act of voting, when not deliberated, isn’t really legitimate.

For example, the 2016 Brexit referendum. The procedure? Technically fine. The environment? Swirling with misinformation. The campaign was basically slogans and speculative claims. Mainly, leaving the European Union would allow the United Kingdom to redirect £350 million per week to the National Health Service. This figure was misleading and repeatedly discredited by experts. When citizen deliberation is neglected, what remains is a political structure drained of its moral content, in which the people still vote, but aren’t truly governing themselves.

Democracy offers free speech and free press. But what good does this do if citizens can’t distinguish free speech from noise, or even propaganda? What if the public won’t face the uncomfortable truths? 

Seymour Hersh’s revelations, like the My Lai massacre and the abuses at Abu Ghraib, illustrate the drastic consequences. Rather than demanding accountability and reform, citizens denied, deflected and even ignored his findings. Through a misinformed citizenry, democracy enabled some of history’s worst leaders to rise.

Democracy is manipulated when citizens can’t answer 2 questions: what should be consumed and why. The consequence isn’t just mismatched voting; it is a distorted reality. 

Voters can’t hold leaders accountable or shape vital policies. They become deluded, or on the other hand, overly cynical/disengaged. This alienation fuels political apathy and paves the way for leaders who exploit confusion and fear rather than reason. In such environments, political debates lose their grounding in shared reality, making consensus or compromise increasingly unattainable. And just like that, the heart of democracy is gone.

Ultimately, the legitimacy of democracy and its ethos lies beyond participation, but in the quality of that participation. A democracy loses meaning with disengaged, non-deliberating citizens. While the uninformed citizen might be politically useless, the ill-informed or undiscerning citizen is dangerous: their swayed votes, misinformed slogans and opinions can undermine the core justice of democracy itself.