The Proceduralist Paradox: Emotional Sovereignty, Procedural Capture, and the Limits of Formal Legitimacy

This working paper develops the concept of the proceduralist paradox: the difficulty faced by thin procedural accounts of legitimacy when they criticize authoritarian regimes or captured democracies that preserve formal procedures while destroying the conditions under which those procedures can generate legitimate authority. Authoritarian regimes may maintain constitutions, elections, courts, referenda, assemblies, and legal forms. Democratic orders may also be procedurally captured when formally legal mechanisms of membership, media influence, administration, judicial reform, or public participation are used to erode the background conditions under which citizens can receive authority as theirs. The paper argues that these cases reveal a lower-level condition that procedure itself presupposes: the Affective Uptake Condition (AUC), developed in Hong’s foundational ES/AUC preprint. AUC does not prescribe a new procedure. It supplies a criterion for judging whether any procedure can function as legitimacy-generating rather than legitimacy-mimicking or legitimacy-capturing. Procedures become legitimate only when they remain receivable as ours under conditions of non-coercion, non-deception, dignity, safety, and revisable affective uptake. The paper concludes by opening a research path for future diagnostic indicators that can assess these public conditions without reducing legitimacy to private emotion or popularity.