Elite legitimation and delegitimation of international organizations in the media: Patterns and explanations

Abstract

Legitimacy communication in the media reveals when elites become attentive to international organizations' (IOs) legitimacy and whether they support or question their legitimacy. The intensity and tone of this communication results in communicative support or legitimacy pressures on IOs. Extant research gives few insights into the scope and nature of elite legitimacy communication and the factors that shape it. This article offers a comparative and longitudinal analysis of the patterns of elite communication in the media. It maps and explains variation in the intensity and tone of legitimacy communication based on a quantitative content analysis of roughly 6500 legitimacy evaluations of the EU, the G8, and the UN in the quality press of four established democracies. A multinomial logistic regression analysis yields three key results. First, in contrast to conventional expectations, there is no clear shift from low intensity and positive tone to high intensity and negative tone. Second, communication intensity is considerably higher for powerful IOs. Third, political events, including security crises and institutional reform, are important drivers of the ebbs and flows of western elites' communicative support and pressure on major IOs.

The rise of democratic legitimation: why international organizations speak the language of democracy

“…Taking this insight seriously, our results demonstrate that, while the ability to define the conceptual terrain on which legitimacy is negotiated constitute an important general source of power, the ability to define the terms of democracy has become a specific form of power in contemporary world politics. content analysis world, these discussions served two important purposes: first, to arrive at a common understanding in dealing with "close calls"; and second, to maintain reliability among coders over a coding process that covered several months (for as similar approach, see Schmidtke, 2018). 5.…”

Authority, politicization, and alternative justifications: endogenous legitimation dynamics in global economic governance1

“…The resulting public mobilization of competing political preferences has been labelled as the politicization of international institutions (Z€ urn, Binder, & Ecker-Ehrhardt, 2012). Recent literature traces evidence of such increasing politicization in individual attitudes (Dellmuth, 2016;Ecker-Ehrhardt, 2012), mobilization of interest groups (D€ ur & Mateo, 2014;Ecker-Erhardt & Z€ urn, 2013;Z€ urn & Walter, 2005), national partisan competition (Hooghe & Marks, 2009;Hutter & Grande, 2014;Rauh, 2015), national media (Rauh & B€ odeker, 2016;Rixen & Zangl, 2013;Schmidtke, 2018;Statham & Trenz, 2012), and protest events (Della Porta & Tarrow, 2004;Uba & Uggla, 2011). The authority-politicization nexus is often not direct and linear but rather mediated by specific events, policy crises, or particular national contexts (De Wilde & Z€ urn, 2012;Hooghe & Marks, 2009;Hutter & Grande, 2014).…”

“…Even if the citizenry is not following each and every international decision, the basic recognition that there is political authority beyond the nation state creates a latent mobilization potential. In this context, elite cues on governance beyond the nation state matter for whether this latent mobilization potential turns into fundamental opposition (Neuner, 2018;Schmidtke, 2018;Steenbergen, Edwards, & de Vries, 2007).…”

On Legitimacy Crises and the Resources of Global Governance Institutions: A Surprisingly Weak Relationship?

“…A growing literature on legitimacy in global governance assumes that GGIs need legitimacy to perform effectively (e.g. Bernstein, ; Buchanan and Keohane, ; Dellmuth and Tallberg, ; Hurd, ; Schmidtke, ; Scholte, ; Zürn, ). However, the causal mechanisms between legitimacy and effectiveness have thus far remained rather underspecified.…”