Elites’ (De)legitimation Practices towards Global Governance Institutions

• In Event: Legitimzing and De-legitimizing International Cooperation

Abstract

Prior research has often focussed on the way in which states legitimate global governance. In contrast, this paper explores the practices that both political (i.e. in party-politics and bureaucracies) and societal (i.e. business, civil society, media and research) elites engage in when seeking to legitimate or delegitimate global governance institutions (GGIs).
We distinguish between discursive and behavioural practices that might affect different audiences’ legitimacy beliefs vis-à-vis certain global governance institutions (GGIs). The specific research questions we address are: What kind of practices of GGI (de)legitimation are most frequently used by elites? How does this vary across GGIs and elite types? What factors explain variation in elite (de)legitimation practices? The paper uses unique data from a new survey of 860 political and societal elites in Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, the USA, and on a global level to perform the first systematic analysis of these questions. In the empirical analysis, we first present descriptive statistics on patterns of elite (de)legitimation practices. Second, in the explanatory analysis we test hypotheses related to a) the targeted GGI, b) the type of elite, and c) attitudes of individual elite actors. We find that most elites do engage in (de)legitimation of GGIs, but not very frequently. Legitimation is much more common than delegitimation. While discursive practices are more frequently used, behavioral practices are more important than acknowledged in previous research. Attitudes of elite individuals (confidence in the GGI and ideological position) can partly explain the use of different (de)legitimation practices. Based on these findings we elaborate on how to advance theory on practices of (de)legitimation within a broader framework of the politics of legitimation in global governance.

Authors

• Soetkin Verhaegen, UCLouvain

• Anders Uhlin, Lund University