Contemporary society has witnessed major growth in global governance, yet the legitimacy of global governance remains deeply in question. This book offers the first full comparative investigation of citizen and elite legitimacy beliefs toward global governance. Empirically, it provides a comprehensive analysis of public and elite opinion toward global governance, building on two uniquely coordinated surveys covering multiple countries and international organizations. Theoretically, it develops an individual-level approach, exploring how a person’s characteristics in respect of socioeconomic status, political values, geographical identification, and domestic institutional trust shape legitimacy beliefs toward global governance. The book’s central findings are threefold. First, there is a notable and general elite–citizen gap in legitimacy beliefs toward global governance. While elites on average hold moderately high levels of legitimacy toward international organizations, the general public is decidedly more skeptical. Second, individual-level differences in interests, values, identities, and trust dispositions provide significant drivers of citizen and elite legitimacy beliefs toward global governance, as well as the gap between the two groups. Most important on the whole are differences in the extent to which citizens and elites trust domestic political institutions, which shape how these groups assess the legitimacy of international organizations. Third, both patterns and sources of citizen and elite legitimacy beliefs vary across organizations and countries. These variations suggest that institutional and societal contexts condition attitudes toward global governance. The book’s findings shed light on future opportunities and constraints in international cooperation, suggesting that current levels of legitimacy point neither to a general crisis of global governance nor to a general readiness for its expansion. 

This article offers the first systematic and comparative analysis of the effects of elite communication on citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Departing from cueing theory, it develops novel hypotheses about the effects of elite communication under the specific conditions of global governance. It tests these hypotheses by conducting a population-based survey experiment among almost 10,000 residents of three countries in relation to five IOs. The evidence suggests four principal findings. First, communication by national governments and civil society organizations has stronger effects on legitimacy perceptions than communication by IOs themselves. Secondly, elite communication affects legitimacy perceptions irrespective of whether it invokes IOs’ procedures or performance as grounds for criticism or endorsement. Thirdly, negative messages are more effective than positive messages in shaping citizens' legitimacy perceptions. Fourthly, comparing across IOs indicates that elite communication is more often effective in relation to the IMF, NAFTA and WTO, than the EU and UN.

Scholars and policy makers debate whether elites and citizens hold different views of the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Until now, sparse data has limited our ability to establish such gaps and to formulate theories for explaining them. This article offers the first systematic comparative analysis of elite and citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of IOs. It examines legitimacy beliefs toward six key IOs, drawing on uniquely coordinated survey evidence from Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, and the United States. We find a notable elite-citizen gap for all six IOs, four of the five countries, and all of six different elite types. Developing an individual-level approach to legitimacy beliefs, we argue that this gap is driven by systematic differences between elites and citizens in characteristics that matter for attitudes toward IOs. Our findings suggest that deep-seated differences between elites and general publics may present major challenges for democratic and effective international cooperation.

Do international shaming efforts affect citizens’ support for government policies? While it is a frequent claim in the literature that shaming works through domestic politics, we know little about how and when international criticism affects domestic public opinion. We address this question through an originally designed survey experiment in Sweden, which (i) compares the effects of international shaming in two issue areas—human rights and climate change, and (ii) tests whether government responses to criticism moderate the impact of shaming. Our main findings are fourfold. First, we find substantial effects of international shaming on domestic public opinion. These effects hold across both issue areas and irrespective of whether citizens support government parties or not. Second, human rights shaming has a stronger impact on citizens’ support for government policies than climate shaming. Third, shaming is most effective among citizens who are more supportive of climate action, human rights, and international cooperation. Finally, our findings are mixed with respect to the effect of government responses. While government responses do not moderate the effects of human rights shaming, they seem to mitigate the effects of climate shaming. 

While recent decades have witnessed a rise in the use and forms of Global Performance Indicators (GPIs), there is little systematic evidence on their effects. In this article, we address the effects of GPIs through a specific focus on international organizations’ (IOs) reporting on state compliance with international rules. We focus on the International Labour Organization (ILO), which offers a unique case for evaluating the impact of performance indicators in the absence of enforcement. We develop an argument for why reporting by IOs should lead states to correct non-compliant behavior, and when those effects should be particularly strong. Our principal findings are three-fold. First, ILO reporting has significant and durable effects on state respect for labor rights, especially in addressing severe cases of non-compliance. Second, reporting affects state behavior quite immediately, but can also lead to improvements when repeated over longer periods of time. Third, reporting has stronger effects on improvements in labor rights when the target states are democratic and have the resource capacity to correct violations. These findings have important implications for our understanding of GPIs and the effect of IO reporting on state compliance.

When are international organizations (IOs) responsive to the policy problems that motivated their establishment? While it is a conventional assumption that IOs exist to address transnational challenges, the question of whether and when IO policy-making is responsive to shifts in underlying problems has not been systematically explored.This study investigates the responsiveness of IOs from a large-n, comparative approach. Theoretically, we develop three alternative models of IO responsiveness, emphasizing severeness, dependence, and power differentials. Empirically, we focus on the domain of security, examining the responsiveness of eight multi-issue IOs to armed conflict between 1980 and 2015, using a novel and expansive dataset on IO policy decisions. Our findings suggest, first, that IOs are responsive to security problems and, second, that responsiveness is not primarily driven by dependence or power differentials but by problem severity. An in-depth study of the responsiveness of the UN Security Council using more granular data confirms these findings. As the first comparative study of whether and when IO policy adapts to problem severity, the article has implications for debates about IO responsiveness, performance, and legitimacy.

This article develops a novel approach for studying the influence of supranational institutions in international cooperation. While earlier research tends to treat member states as a collective yielding influence on supranational institutions, we unpack this collective to explore differentiated supranational influence. To this end, the article makes three contributions. First, it develops a method for measuring differentiated supranational influence that makes it possible to identify which member states give ground when a supranational institution is influential. Second, it theorizes the sources of differentiated supranational influence, arguing that states are more likely to accommodate a supranational institution when they are more dependent on the resources of this institution. Third, it illustrates the usefulness of this approach empirically through an analysis of the influence of the European Commission in European Union bargaining. The analysis suggests that our approach can measure and explain differentiated supranational influence under conditions of both heightened crisis and everyday politics.

International organizations (IOs) experience significant variation in their decision-making performance, or the extent to which they produce policy output. While some IOs are efficient decision-making machineries, others are plagued by deadlock. How can such variation be explained? Examining this question, the article makes three central contributions. First, we approach performance by looking at IO decision-making in terms of policy output and introduce an original measure of decision-making performance that captures annual growth rates in IO output. Second, we offer a novel theoretical explanation for decision-making performance. This account highlights the role of institutional design, pointing to how majoritarian decision rules, delegation of authority to supranational institutions, and access for transnational actors (TNAs) interact to affect decision-making. Third, we offer the first comparative assessment of the decision-making performance of IOs. While previous literature addresses single IOs, we explore decision-making across a broad spectrum of 30 IOs from 1980 to 2011. Our analysis indicates that IO decision-making performance varies across and within IOs. We find broad support for our theoretical account, showing the combined effect of institutional design features in shaping decision-making performance. Notably, TNA access has a positive effect on decision-making performance when pooling is greater, and delegation has a positive effect when TNA access is higher. We also find that pooling has an independent, positive effect on decision-making performance. All-in-all, these findings suggest that the institutional design of IOs matters for their decision-making performance, primarily in more complex ways than expected in earlier research.

Legitimacy is central for the capacity of global governance institutions to address problems such as climate change, trade protectionism, and human rights abuses. However, despite legitimacy’s importance for global governance, its workings remain poorly understood. That is the core concern of this volume: to develop an agenda for systematic and comparative research on legitimacy in global governance. In complementary fashion, the chapters address different aspects of the overarching question: whether, why, how, and with what consequences global governance institutions gain, sustain, and lose legitimacy. The volume makes four specific contributions. First, it argues for a sociological approach to legitimacy, centered on perceptions of legitimate global governance among affected audiences. Second, it moves beyond the traditional focus on states as the principal audience for legitimacy in global governance and considers a full spectrum of actors from governments to citizens. Third, it advocates a comparative approach to the study of legitimacy in global governance, and suggests strategies for comparison across institutions, issue areas, countries, societal groups, and time. Fourth, the volume offers the most comprehensive treatment so far of the sociological legitimacy of global governance, covering three broad analytical themes: (1) sources of legitimacy, (2) processes of legitimation and delegitimation, and (3) consequences of legitimacy.

Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a technological upheaval with the potential to change human society. Because of its transformative potential, AI is increasingly becoming subject to regulatory initiatives at the global level. Yet, so far, scholarship in political science and international relations has focused more on AI applications than on the emerging architecture of global AI regulation. The purpose of this article is to outline an agenda for research into the global governance of AI. The article distinguishes between two broad perspectives: an empirical approach, aimed at mapping and explaining global AI governance; and a normative approach, aimed at developing and applying standards for appropriate global AI governance. The two approaches offer questions, concepts, and theories that are helpful in gaining an understanding of the emerging global governance of AI. Conversely, exploring AI as a regulatory issue offers a critical opportunity to refine existing general approaches to the study of global governance.

Recent decades have witnessed the emergence and spread of a broad range of liberal norms in global governance, among them sustainable development, gender equality, and human security. While existing scholarship tells us a lot about the trajectories of particular norms, we know much less about the broader patterns and sources of commitments to liberal norms by international organizations (IOs). This article offers the first comparative large-N analysis of such commitments, building on a unique dataset on JO policy decisions over the time period 1980-2015. Distinguishing between deep norm commitment and shallow norm recognition, the analysis produces several novel findings. We establish that IOs' deeper commitments to liberal norms primarily are driven by internal conditions: democratic memberships and institutional designs more conducive to norm entrepreneurship. In contrast, legitimacy standards in the external environment of IOs, often invoked in existing research, mainly account for shallower recognition or talk of norms.

The expectation that state voice drives perceptions of the legitimacy of international institutions is a common theme in academicscholarship and policy discourse on global power shifts. This article tests this expectation empirically, using novel andunique survey data on legitimacy perceptions toward eight international institutions among political and societal elites in sixcountries, comprising both rising and established powers. The article finds only limited support for a link between a state’svoice in an international institution and elite perceptions of legitimacy. Differences in formal state representation are onlypartly reflected in patterns of perceived legitimacy across the six countries. In addition, there is no evidence at the individuallevel that assessments of state voice shape elites’ perceptions of institutional legitimacy. Instead, considerations of good governancebest predict whether elites perceive of international institutions as more or less legitimate. These findings suggestthat only institutional reforms which are seen to favor general qualities of good governance, and not narrow demands forstate voice, are likely to be rewarded with greater legitimacy.