The Performance Test

A South Korean court sentenced its former president to life in prison this week. Yoon Suk Yeol had attempted martial law — the most fundamental violation a democratic leader can commit. The system caught him, tried him, and convicted him. A democracy defending itself against its own head of state.

By any historical standard, this is extraordinary. Most democracies that face an internal coup don't survive the attempt intact, much less convict the attacker in open court. South Korea passed the test.

And yet.

For twenty consecutive years, democracy has been in global decline. More countries are now classified as autocracies than democracies. The trend didn't reverse after high-profile accountability victories. It didn't reverse after free elections expanded. It continues regardless — a slow erosion that accountability moments can't seem to arrest.

This week tells the story in miniature. While South Korea demonstrates that democratic institutions can hold even their highest leaders accountable, Hamas is quietly extending governance across Gaza — organizing security, collecting taxes, delivering services — despite having been militarily devastated. The militant group lost the war and won the administration. It governs not because anyone voted for it, but because it showed up with functioning systems when no one else did.

Two signals on the same day. One system passes the accountability test. Another fails every procedural test but passes the one that apparently matters more: it works.

There was a time — centuries, actually — when legitimacy derived from who you were. The divine right of kings wasn't metaphor. It was infrastructure. The king was legitimate because God chose him, and God's choice was verified by the fact that he was king. Circular, but effective. It held for a thousand years.

Constitutional democracy replaced divine right with a different legitimacy source: process. The leader is legitimate not because of who they are but because of how they got there. Fair elections. Rule of law. Separation of powers. Checks and balances. The genius of the design was that it made the mechanism more important than the person inside it. You could put a fool in the presidency, and if the process was sound, the system would hold.

This worked because it solved the actual problem. For centuries, the question was: how do we prevent power from becoming tyranny? Constitutional democracy answered it — imperfectly, incrementally, but convincingly enough that it became the default framework for legitimate governance worldwide.

The question has shifted.

The new question isn't "can you prevent tyranny?" It's "can you deliver?" Can your system produce jobs, reduce costs, maintain safety, provide services, and generate the conditions for people to live with some measure of dignity and predictability?

This isn't a new demand. People have always wanted material outcomes. What's new is the decoupling — the severing of legitimacy from institutional form and its reattachment to functional output. Process used to be the proxy. You trusted the system because the process was fair, and fair process would eventually produce good outcomes. The proxy held as long as the correlation was visible.

When it stopped being visible — when democracies produced stagnation, inequality, declining services, and unresponsive institutions despite maintaining procedural integrity — the proxy broke. People didn't stop wanting fair process. They stopped believing fair process was sufficient.

The shift is subtle but structural. Under process legitimacy, a corrupt outcome from fair procedures is a flaw to be fixed within the system. Under performance legitimacy, a fair process that produces bad outcomes is the system's indictment.

Watch how this plays out across today's signals.

South Korea's life sentence is a triumph of process legitimacy. The mechanisms held. The courts functioned. The military obeyed civilian authority. This is the test that constitutional democracy was designed to pass: "Can you hold your own powerful accountable?" Yes. The answer, in this case, is an unqualified yes.

But the question South Korean citizens are likely asking isn't "did our institutions hold?" It's "will life get better?" — and process victories don't answer that question. The conviction doesn't lower housing costs or reduce economic inequality or restore demographic confidence. It proves the system works without proving the system works for them.

Hamas, by contrast, fails every procedural test. It wasn't elected to its current role. Its governance is enforced, not consented to. Its authority rests on the absence of alternatives, not the presence of legitimacy. But it delivers functioning bureaucracy into a void where no one else is providing it. Security. Tax collection. Dispute resolution. The basics of governance, stripped of all the democratic apparatus. And in that stripped-down form, it produces something that procedural legitimacy struggles to match: tangible daily function.

This is not an argument for Hamas. It's an observation about what legitimacy has become. When the criteria shift from "how did you get power?" to "what does power do?", the competitive landscape changes entirely.

The pattern has precedent. Every legitimacy framework eventually faces a performance gap — the distance between what the system promises and what it delivers.

The divine right of kings faced its performance gap during plagues, famines, and lost wars. If God chose the king, why was the kingdom suffering? The gap created space for revolution.

Constitutional monarchy faced its performance gap during industrialization. Parliaments couldn't respond quickly enough to the social upheaval of urbanization, child labor, and economic transformation. The gap created space for expanded suffrage and the welfare state.

The Soviet system faced its performance gap in the 1970s and 1980s. The theory promised material abundance through planning. The reality was scarcity, stagnation, and a grey sameness that the theory couldn't explain. The gap created space for collapse.

Each transition followed the same structure: a legitimacy framework optimized for one question (divine authority, procedural fairness, ideological correctness) was measured against a different question (material outcomes, personal freedom, economic dynamism) and found wanting. Not because the framework was wrong about its own question — but because the question changed.

What's alarming about the current transition is its speed and its breadth. Twenty years of decline across dozens of countries isn't a blip or a backlash. It's a structural migration.

The usual explanation — that populists are exploiting grievances, that social media distorts discourse, that economic inequality breeds resentment — treats the symptoms. The structural explanation is simpler: performance legitimacy is reasserting itself as the default, after a historical period in which process legitimacy appeared sufficient.

That historical period — roughly 1945 to 2005 — was unusual. Post-war democracies did deliver material improvement, dramatically and consistently, for a large enough portion of their populations to make the process-performance correlation seem natural. Fair elections led to responsive governance led to shared prosperity. The process was the performance.

When that correlation broke — when democracies began producing stagnation, polarization, and institutional sclerosis while maintaining procedural correctness — the process stopped serving as a performance proxy. And once that proxy breaks, it doesn't easily reassemble.

The uncomfortable implication is this: South Korea's life sentence may be the system's finest hour and also irrelevant to its survival.

The conviction proves that checks and balances work — that a democracy can defend itself against internal assault. But the legitimacy question facing democracies today isn't "can you stop a coup?" It's "can you make life better?" And the former doesn't answer the latter.

A system can pass the accountability test and fail the delivery test. It can convict its president and still watch its citizens lose faith. Because the criteria have shifted, and the system is still optimizing for the old exam.

This isn't a counsel of despair. It's a diagnostic. The pattern is visible, which means it's addressable. But addressing it requires acknowledging what's changed.

Process legitimacy isn't obsolete. It still matters — deeply. A society without checks on power, without fair courts, without the mechanisms South Korea demonstrated this week, is a society that eventually collapses into tyranny. The accountability infrastructure is necessary.

It's just no longer sufficient.

The systems that survive the current transition will be the ones that learn to pass both tests simultaneously: the accountability test and the performance test. Not procedure or delivery, but procedure that delivers. The ones that fail will be the ones that keep pointing to their institutional integrity while their citizens ask why the lights don't work.

The test changed. The systems that notice will adapt. The ones that don't — well. History has shown us what happens to institutions that keep answering yesterday's question.

A court in Seoul proved that democracy can hold its highest leader accountable for its gravest violation. The question that matters now is whether anyone outside that courtroom felt their life change.

Sources: BBC World News — South Korea ex-president sentenced to life for martial law attempt, 2026-02-19