Foundations of Constitutional Civic Realism

Description (Abstract) — Foundations of Constitutional Civic Realism Constitutional Civic Realism (CCR) is a structural–institutional framework for analyzing political power, legitimacy, and civic order. This paper introduces CCR as a corrective to dominant traditions in political sociology, political philosophy, and democratic theory that mislocate the source of power and legitimacy in concepts, moral justification, or procedural form. CCR argues instead that power is a structural possibility created by institutional arrangements, and that political legitimacy arises from durable institutional balance and non-domination among organized powers. The paper develops three core claims. First, political power is not a property, capacity, or moral attribute possessed by actors, but an emergent condition produced by institutional design. Second, legitimacy is not a moral property conferred by justice, consent, or procedural correctness, but a structural outcome that depends on the reciprocal ability of organized powers to constrain one another. Third, when institutional balance erodes, legitimacy collapses even as formal rules, norms, and procedures remain intact. CCR provides a unifying framework for understanding why contemporary societies experience escalating moral outrage, procedural conflict, and legitimacy crises despite high levels of legal formality and democratic ritual. By relocating causal analysis upstream to institutional structure, the framework explains why reform efforts focused on ethics, discourse, or procedure repeatedly fail under conditions of asymmetrical power. This foundational paper establishes the conceptual vocabulary and analytic orientation for a series of CCR critiques addressing conceptual theories of power, moral legitimacy theories, democratic proceduralism, critical and cultural theories of hegemony, and governance and state-capacity models. The aim is not ideological advocacy, but a structural diagnosis of legitimacy breakdowns in complex democratic and post-democratic systems.