Legitimacy as a Compression Artifact: Internal Coherence, External Ratification, and the Mechanics of System Drift

I publish this draft to invite critique and rigorous feedback from the scholarly philosophical community on PhilArchive. | | | Modern analysis treats “legitimacy” as a single property—one score, one axis, one verdict. This paper argues that legitimacy-talk is usually a compression artifact: it collapses separable variables and then confuses their distinct failure modes. I decompose legitimacy into two properties: Internal Coherence (IC), the degree to which a system remains self-consistent within its own charter, incentives, and enforcement machinery; and External Ratification (ER), the degree to which a system’s commitments remain coordinatable under risk—treated as bindable rather than theatrical under stress. The paper then states an explicit transmission channel linking them: IC drift accumulates when charter claims diverge from incentives, enforcement, and outputs; drift becomes externally legible; external actors hedge and substitute; coalition convergence produces nonlinear ER loss. The goal is diagnostic rather than moral: to make stability, drift, and failure modes structurally visible in chartered orders that scale into pervasive environments. | | | Domains: Social & Political Philosophy · Political Economy · Social Theory / Historical Sociology · Philosophy of Social Science · Organizational / Institutional Theory · Systems Theory