The Proceduralist Paradox: Emotional Sovereignty, Procedural Capture, and the Limits of Formal Legitimacy

This working paper is a derivative conceptual note based on and citing the author’s foundational ES/AUC preprint, Emotional Sovereignty: The Affective Ground That Legitimacy Theories Presuppose (Hong 2026). It applies the Emotional Sovereignty / Affective Uptake Condition (AUC) framework to the problem of procedural legitimacy, authoritarian procedural mimicry, and democratic procedural capture. The paper argues that formal procedures do not generate legitimate authority merely by existing or by being technically valid. Procedures become legitimacy-generating only when they remain receivable as “ours” under conditions of non-coercion, non-deception, dignity, safety, and revisable affective uptake. Without such conditions, procedure may imitate legitimacy or become a mechanism of capture. This document is a Working Paper / Zenodo Preprint Note. It fixes the procedural-legitimacy extension of AUC as a public research coordinate while leaving room for later journal-article expansion and peer-review revision.