This article provides a longitudinal analysis on the driving forces behind Europeans' positions toward development aid and identifies changes in the dynamics following the migrant flows in 2015. Specifically, it assesses the extent to which policy‐makers' decisions to utilize development policy as a strategic tool to manage migration resonates at the public level. Using multilevel regression models on cross‐sectional survey data acquired from Eurobarometer surveys covering five waves between 2013 and 2018, supplemented by a series of macro‐level covariates both at the country and regional level, I show that voters in countries and regions with higher numbers of migrants are more supportive of foreign aid. The models also verify that support for foreign aid in polities that are the destination for migrants is substantially stronger in surveys conducted after 2015 than before and among voters who are interested in politics.

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This study investigates the driving forces of public endorsement of two major intergovernmental organizations—the UN and NATO. More specifically, I scrutinize the effects of two sets of independent variables on individual support for security intergovernmental organizations: respondents’ subjective evaluation of the domestic economic conditions and the gap between the home country’s foreign policy preferences and the mean preference within the said intergovernmental organization. For the empirical analysis, I employ cross-sectional survey data acquired from Pew Global Attitudes Surveys covering a sample of 37 countries and 10 waves spanning 2007–2017. The statistical analyses lend strong support for both hypotheses. Specifically, citizens who are dissatisfied with the national economic conditions are less likely to be in favor of intergovernmental organizations. The negative correlation between the perceptions of domestic economic performance and attitudes toward intergovernmental organizations is particularly compelling in countries that contribute more to the budget of that intergovernmental organization. Second, in countries where the foreign policy preferences converge with the other members of an intergovernmental organization, public opinion is more favorably disposed toward that intergovernmental organization.

What effects do international crises have on the public legitimacy of International Organizations (IOs)? Deviating from previous research, we argue that such crises make those international organizations more salient that are mandated to solve the respective crisis. This results in two main effects. First, the public legitimacy of those IOs becomes more dependent on citizens' crisis-induced worries, leading to a more positive view of those IOs. Second, as the higher salience also leads to higher levels of elite communication regarding IOs, elite blaming of the IOs during crises results in direct negative effects on public legitimacy beliefs on IOs. Finally, both the valence and content of the elite discourse additionally moderate the positive effects of crisis-induced worries. Implementing survey experiments on public legitimacy beliefs on the WHO during the COVID-19 crisis with about 4400 respondents in Austria, Germany and Turkey, we find preliminary evidence for the expectations derived from our salience argument. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for future research on IO legitimacy and IO legitimation.

This article explores the determinants of individual support for common aid policy in the European Union, the largest multilateral contributor of foreign aid. Using the 2016 Eurobarometer survey data, I first investigate the influence of individuals’ assessments of aid objectives on support for multilateral disbursements, and second, I explore the effect of country-level factors, population and economic power. Multilevel regression models reveal that those who prioritize economic infrastructural projects in developing countries are highly negative of the utilization of EU channels. Conversely, individual preferences for the promotion of democratic reforms and the provision of basic necessities are strongly and positively associated with the dependent variable. The results also demonstrate that individuals living in lower income and less populated polities are more positively disposed towards common aid policy.