… is from page 19 of Christopher Achen’s and Larry Bartels’s new (2016) book, Democracy for Realists (link added):
In our view, the ideal of popular sovereignty plays much the same role in contemporary democratic ideology that the divine right of kings played in the monarchical era. It is a “quasi-religious commitment,” in [James] Stimson‘s terms, a fiction providing legitimacy and stability to political systems whose actual workings are manifestly – and inevitably – rather less than divine.
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