Political Authority and the Accommodation of Minorities

Alex Schwartz, Queen's University Belfast School of Law, has published Authority, Nationality, and Minorities at 28 Ratio Juris 354 (2015). Here is the abstract.

Prominent normative theories for accommodating minority national groups appeal to the value of national cultures and/or the psychology of group recognition. This article aims to show that an argument from political authority provides a better justification. Building on Joseph Raz's theory of authority, the article argues that members of minority national groups are disadvantaged in relation to their majority counterparts under standard democratic institutions; such institutions do not provide minority national groups with comparable access to the conditions for legitimate political authority. Constitutional arrangements for accommodating minority national groups — such as territorial self‐government or power‐sharing — are justified insofar as they might offset this disadvantage.

The full text is not available for free from SSRN.