The Democratic Legitimacy of Unelected Indigenous Governments

• In Event: Reimagining Democracy through Comparative Democratic Theory

Abstract

Many Indigenous nations in the settler state of Canada have two governments: elective band councils and a customary leadership that is sometimes unelected. When these groups struggle for authority, outsiders often side with the band councils, assuming that non-electoral governments are undemocratic. We argue that this assumption reflects an unwarranted electoral bias. Some non-electoral Indigenous governments gain substantial democratic legitimacy by providing a framework for self-determination that (unlike band councils) cannot be reasonably rejected as a colonial imposition; by providing non-electoral mechanisms encouraging responsiveness that may function better than electoral; and by performing superior systemic deliberation than an alternative electoral system. In some contexts, these benefits may be sufficiently weighty to make customary governance more democratically legitimacy than elective.

Authors

• Daniel Sherwin, Carleton University

• Daniel Hutton Ferris, Newcastle University