Abstract
Recent public opinion research has established an empirical regularity of unusual stability and strength: citizen beliefs in the legitimacy of national and international institutions are highly linked. The dominant interpretation of this link holds that citizens draw on their perceptions of national institutions as a heuristic when forming opinions about international institutions. This article proposes an alternative mechanism, privileging social trust as an antecedent factor contributing to both national and international legitimacy beliefs. Using original survey data on citizen attitudes toward four international institutions in three countries, the article provides evidence for social trust as an antecedent factor, while granting no support for the dominant interpretation. The article suggests three broader implications: social trust has more far-reaching consequences for international cooperation than previously understood; political efforts to affect the legitimacy of international institutions are constrained by individual predispositions; and a comparative approach is central to the study of public attitudes toward international institutions.
Highlights
Legitimacy in the eyes of the people may matter in profound ways for international institutions
Less politically aware people do not appear more likely to let their legitimacy beliefs toward international institutions be guided by their legitimacy beliefs toward national institutions, as this interpretation would suggest. These findings are robust when using more comprehensive cross-national data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Social Survey (ESS) for a restricted set of variables in the context of the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU). These findings suggest that social trust has more far-reaching implications than previously understood, that political efforts to affect the legitimacy of international institutions are constrained by individual predispositions, and that a comparative approach is important for the study of public opinion toward international institutions
Many have speculated that poor awareness of international institutions leads citizens to rely on domestic heuristics, but this interpretation has performed badly when tested empirically
Summary
Legitimacy in the eyes of the people may matter in profound ways for international institutions. Attentive to the potential importance of legitimacy for international institutions, International Relations (IR) scholars are beginning to systematically study its determinants, tracking longstanding efforts in comparative politics, political theory, and sociology to better understand the sources of legitimacy (Beetham 1991; Easton 1975; Suchman 1995; Weber [1922] 1978).1 This emerging literature has encountered an empirical regularity of unusual stability and strength: citizen beliefs in the legitimacy of national and international institutions are highly linked (Johnson 2011; Muñoz et al 2011; Sattler and Urpelainen 2012; Harteveld et al 2013; Voeten 2013; Armingeon and Ceka 2014; Chalmers and Dellmuth 2015; Dellmuth and Tallberg 2015; Schlipphak 2015; Ares et al 2017). It is substantively important: the perceived legitimacy of domestic institutions is usually the strongest predictor of an international institution’s legitimacy, even when controlling for other relevant individual-level factors such as economic considerations, political awareness, and social identity
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