Original
Effects of Popular Legitimacy on International Organizations: An Elite Survey Experiment
Abstract
Whether or not popular legitimacy matters for international organizations (IOs) is a topic of extensive assumption but little rigorous research. A key obstacle has been the methodological difficulties of establishing legitimacy’s effect using observational data. This article offers the first experimental study of the effects of popular legitimacy on IOs. Theoretically, we propose that popular legitimacy affects IOs through the mechanism of government responsiveness to public opinion. Empirically, we test this expectation by presenting elected politicians in Sweden with a scenario of proposed reforms to the World Health Organization (WHO) and randomized information about the organization’s degree of popular legitimacy. The results show that higher levels of popular legitimacy made politicians more willing to confer additional authority and resources on the IO. The effects were particularly large among politicians with positive pretreatment attitudes toward the WHO and leftist ideological orientations. These findings suggest that popular legitimacy matters by affecting national decision-makers’ willingness to empower IOs.
中文
民众合法性对国际组织的影响：一项精英调查实验
摘要
民众合法性是否对国际组织（IOs）具有重要意义，是一个被广泛假定但缺乏严谨研究的问题。一个关键障碍在于，使用观察数据确立合法性的效应存在方法论上的困难。本文首次对民众合法性对国际组织的影响进行实验研究。在理论上，我们提出，民众合法性通过政府对公众舆论的回应这一机制影响国际组织。在实证上，我们通过向瑞典的民选政治人物呈现一项关于世界卫生组织（WHO）拟议改革的场景，并随机提供关于该组织民众合法性程度的信息，来检验这一预期。结果表明，更高水平的民众合法性使政治人物更愿意向国际组织授予额外权威和资源。这一效应在对WHO持积极前测态度以及具有左翼意识形态取向的政治人物中尤其显著。这些发现表明，民众合法性之所以重要，是因为它影响了国家决策者赋权国际组织的意愿。
关键词
民众合法性、国际组织、精英调查实验、世界卫生组织、政府回应性、公众舆论、赋权