Sufficient-Reason Standards for Political Justification

Yueru Li
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Yueru Li: Self-Employed

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Abstract: Political power often justifies itself through legality, expertise, emergency, efficiency, tradition, democratic authorization, or necessity. These vocabularies can be normatively serious, but they can also hide baseline choices, narrow the field of alternatives, obscure incidence, block evidence review, avoid failure conditions, or shift burdens to challengers. This article develops a six-standard framework for assessing the sufficiency of political justification. A political justification is insufficient when it asks others to accept coercion, cost, risk, authority, institutional continuation, or emergency discretion while leaving structurally important parts of the reason unavailable for challenge. The framework is adjacent to public reason, public justification, proportionality analysis, administrative reason-giving, republican anti-arbitrariness, and democratic experimentalism. It asks a different question: not which reasons are admissible, which outcome is correct, or whether a rights limitation is proportionate, but what structure a political reason must disclose before it may claim justificatory sufficiency. The six standards are Baseline Explicitness, Comparative Justification, Incidence Accounting, Epistemic Testability, Failure and Reversibility Conditions, and Burden and Authority Discipline. The article tests the framework through three cases: COMPAS risk assessment, EU ETS free allocation, and early COVID-19 border restrictions. The cases show three distinct forms of justificatory insufficiency: black-box authority, public data with broken causal and distributive accountability, and emergency evidence shortage presented as necessity. The article then develops methodological limits, including symmetry in use, zero-sum boundary conditions, value pluralism, epistemic pluralism, the minimum public-field condition, emergency compression, and rationalization theater. The framework does not promise correct outcomes or consensus. Its contribution is diagnostic: it identifies what remains missing when public power demands acceptance while insulating its baseline, alternatives, incidence, evidence, failure conditions, or authority structure from challenge.

Date: 2026-07-05
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:tgae3_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/tgae3_v1

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