Patterns of Legitimacy Crises in 32 International Organizations

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter provides a large-N analysis of legitimacy crises in international organizations (IOs). It introduces a quantitative measure of legitimacy crisis based on media coverage of elite criticisms and mass protests in leading global newswires. This measure captures historical peaks in legitimacy challenges from different legitimacy audiences over time. The analysis of 32 global and regional IOs between 1985 and 2020 reveals that many, but not all, IOs in the underlying sample have undergone some form of legitimacy crisis. One third of the IOs in this sample have not experienced anything that comes close to a legitimacy crisis, and many others only face relatively weak or unique challenges. The descriptive analysis identifies a concentration of legitimacy crises between 1995 and 2005 while some IOs experienced the worst crisis after 2015, like the EU in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, the G20 with clashes in Hamburg in 2017, and the World Health Organization during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter also reveals a large variation in legitimacy crises at the level of their constitutive audiences, from state to nonstate actors, from geographical or organizational insiders to outsiders, from social elite members to protesters at street level.