Political Legitimacy and Participation in Costa Rica: Evidence of Arena Shopping

Abstract

Considerable research has failed to establish a link between political legitimacy and system breakdown. This does not mean, however, that researchers should abandon the concept of legitimacy altogether, since it may have other important effects that shape the character of the political system. We explore the impact, or lack thereof, of legitimacy on citizen behavior. Specifically, we test the proposition that legitimacy may have complex effects by differentially affecting a variety of modes of citizen participation. Empirical evidence from a 2002 national survey in Costa Rica, a consolidated Latin American democracy, reveals how legitimacy shapes citizens’ political participation and civil society activism. We find that legitimacy has no uniform relationship across diverse modes of political participation. Some legitimacy dimensions increase certain participation modes while they decrease others, but have yet no effect on other modes. Specifically, other factors held constant, greater belief in two dimensions of legitimacy, “political community” and “trust in local government,” increase voting and civil society activism. Low rather than high levels of “system support” increase party activism-instrumental contacting and communal activism, and low trust in regime institutions elevates civil society activism. Contradictory findings emerge on the impact of low legitimacy on protest participation. An important and novel finding is that two legitimacy-participation relationships are curvilinear. These findings suggest that prior research, based on a unidimensional notion of legitimacy and binary treatment of participation as conventional vs. unconventional may have been misleading. We discuss the implications of these patterns for political stability and legitimacy theory.