Abstract

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Keywords:: voluntarism; political obligation; majority consent; tacit consent

Abstract:: Many theories of political obligation try to prove that individuals have a political obligation to obey the wills of the political community, and voluntarism is one of the most influential. The core idea of the voluntarist theory of political obligation is that for each individual citizen, political obligation must be a voluntary commitment based on his consent. To be specific, this idea is the thread running through the three conventional versions and two revised versions of this theory of political obligation: the conventional versions include express consent, hypothetical consent and historical consent; the revised ones include majority consent and tacit consent. At the same time, tacit consent as the core of the revised versions of the theory also involves two “application examples”: one is the voting behavior in the process of election; another is the tacit consent through residence.