Legitimacy and institutional change in international organisations: a cognitive approach

Tobias Lenz,Lora Anne Viola

doi:10.1017/s0260210517000201

Abstract

AbstractWhy are some institutional designs perceived as more legitimate than others, and why is the same institutional design sometimes perceived as legitimacy-enhancing in one setting and not in another? In a world in which most international organisations (IOs) do not fully embody societal values and norms, such as democratic participation and equal treatment, why do legitimacy deficits in some organisations lead to pressure for institutional change while in others they are tolerated? These are important questions given that many analysts have diagnosed a ‘legitimacy crisis’ of IOs, but we argue that existing approaches are ill equipped to answer them. We show that the existing legitimacy literature has an implicit model of institutional change – the congruence model – but that this model has difficulty accounting for important patterns of change and non-change because it lacks microfoundations. We argue that attributions of legitimacy rest on perceptions and this implies the need to investigate the cognitive bases of legitimacy. We introduce a cognitive model of legitimacy and deduce a set of testable propositions to explain the conditions under which legitimacy judgments change and, in turn, produce pressures for institutional change in IOs.

Highlights

Institutionalist scholarship has recently begun to investigate the ways in which perceived legitimacy deficits of international organisations (IOs) create pressures for institutional reform
Why are some institutional designs perceived as more legitimate than others, and why is the same institutional design sometimes perceived as legitimacy-enhancing in one setting and not in another? In a world in which most international organisations (IOs) do not fully embody societal values and norms, such as democratic participation and equal treatment, why do legitimacy deficits in some organisations lead to pressure for institutional change while in others they are tolerated? These are important questions given that many analysts have diagnosed a ‘legitimacy crisis’ of IOs, but we argue that existing approaches are ill equipped to answer them
Beyond the core insight that legitimacy can be a source of institutional change, we still know little about the conditions under which an IO is likely to suffer a perceived legitimacy deficit, when that legitimacy deficit is likely to lead to institutional change, and what type of institutional change we are likely to observe as a result

Summary

Introduction

Institutionalist scholarship has recently begun to investigate the ways in which perceived legitimacy deficits of international organisations (IOs) create pressures for institutional reform. We show that the organisational legitimacy literature has a particular model of institutional change – what we call the congruence model – implicitly embedded within it (Section I) According to this model, incongruence between societal values and an organisation’s procedures, purpose, and performance will lead to a loss of legitimacy and, to pressures for institutional change. Incongruence between societal values and an organisation’s procedures, purpose, and performance will lead to a loss of legitimacy and, to pressures for institutional change This account, we argue, is too coarse; it fails to appreciate the perceptual, and cognitive, nature of legitimacy judgments. We can develop propositions about the conditions under which an incongruence between societal values and organisational features is likely to lead to legitimacy loss, and the conditions under which legitimacy loss is likely to lead to institutional change (Section III)

Legitimacy as an explanation of institutional change

The cognitive foundations of legitimacy

Testable propositions of the cognitive approach to legitimacy

Conclusions