What makes a constitution legitimate? Models grounded in consent, right procedure, or necessary and sufficient justice conditions capture powerful intuitions, but face equally powerful problems: These models generate paradoxes and infinite regress, and their static character ignores legitimacy’s dynamism. Moreover, debates around constitutional interpretation – originalism, living tree, or common good oriented - demonstrate the permanent space between a (constitutional) rule and its application. These debates leave mysterious how legitimacy, once in a constitution, ever gets out. But these issues resolve if we understand legitimacy as something functional, not substantive. Like a currency, I suggest, it can be drawn from diverse (normative and symbolic) sources, banked (in constitutions), and later withdrawn and spent (on political endeavours). This model honours normative intuitions, while escaping puzzles and paradoxes. Moreover, since a constitution’s legitimacy ‘holdings’ can fluctuate with political skill and circumstance, this model capture’s legitimacy’s dynamism. Such a functional model bridges the empirical and normative study of legitimacy, and it may deepen empirical understanding of normativity’s role in regime stability and constitutional change.

This chapter attempts to understand whether and how the increased compliance with due process principles within standards development organizations (SDOs) affects legitimacy and effectiveness of ICT standards. In this regard, it also aims to reveal whether private standards bodies weaken the role of international standards bodies in the ICT sector, and whether the low degree of balance in private standards bodies undermines the legitimacy of modern global economic activity. It further suggests what should be the role of different stakeholders (e.g., SDOs, governments, and courts) in strengthening the different types of legitimacy in ICT standardization, underscoring the importance of feedback mechanisms for SDOs’ decision-making that is currently insufficient or absent from the SDOs’ operational frameworks.

Chapter 7 summarizes the book’s findings and discusses its implications. It underlines the most essential limitation of the appeal of electoral authoritarianism: these regimes become superfluous both when they succeed and when they fail to deliver stability. To maintain popular consent, electoral autocracies must therefore manufacture the types of crises that justify their existence. This paradoxical dynamic has profound implications for these regimes' domestic and international behavior, as recently demonstrated by the aggressive posture of electoral autocracies from across the globe, ranging from Vladimir Putin’s Russia through Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey to the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte.