  As an illustration of different forms of authority for different political entities consider the different parts of the modern state. We might think that a democratic legislative assembly has a genuine right to rule in the sense that citizens owe obedience to it.  They might owe this obedience because the assembly pools all the democratic rights of all the citizens and so citizens treat each other as equals by complying with the assembly's directives.  But citizens do not owe it to courts to respect their judgments about the law.  The courts may create duties but the duties are not owed to them.  The same presumably goes for policemen and adminstrators as well.  They seem to have moral powers to create duties but these duties are not owed to them.  Furthermore, the grounds of authority might be distinct for these two kinds of entities.  The democratic conception might provide the basis of the authority of the assembly while the authority of courts and administrators may be more instrumentally grounded.