Toward an Integrated Framework of Institutional Legitimacy

• In Event: Understanding and Advancing Legitimacy Theory

Abstract

Legitimacy theory is awash with constructs and measures. Despite considerable work addressing this, concepts like trust, trustworthiness, and even legitimacy itself appear in various places and orders in conceptual and statistical models throughout the literature. Similarly, procedural and distributive fairness, normative alignment, and obligation to obey are interchangeably treated as distinct constructs or components of other constructs. Following on arguments posed by others, the proposed talk will present a framework that integrates research from across the social sciences to suggest that legitimacy is a collection of distinct constructs that can be grouped into four classes that occur in a predicable conceptual order for most people, most of the time. Specifically the framework argues that (1) information about the institution drives (2) evaluations of the institution that then create (3) psychological states within the individual, that drive (4) reactions to the institution. The proposed talk will outline the state of the literature before turning to the proposed framework and briefly summarizing two data collection efforts that provide mixed empirical support. The talk will conclude by highlighting challenges to the framework that create opportunities for the research needed to unify and advance legitimacy theory.

Author

• Joseph A Hamm, Michigan State University