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

Why and when do societal elites contest the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs) in the media? In June 2005, just a few weeks after the failed European Constitution referendums in France and the Netherlands, for instance, German newspapers featured an intensive debate between politicians, civil society representatives, and journalists strongly questioning the legitimacy of the European Union (EU). By contrast, only a few weeks later the summit of the Group of Eight (G8) triggered equally intensive but much more positive legitimacy communication among German elites, whereas elites in the United States mostly ignored the legitimacy of the G8. Instead, they critically discussed the legitimacy of the United Nations (UN).

This varied elite communication about IO legitimacy in the media is puzzling for a number of reasons: First, by publicly discussing IO legitimacy, elites reject the deeply entrenched consensus that global governance institutions are legitimate if they are created through state consent (Buchanan and Keohane 2006). Second, elites’ legitimacy evaluations in the media attract public attention and thus risk a significant loss of control over global governance. As soon as issues of international legitimacy spill beyond elite bargaining into the public sphere, legitimacy struggles are likely to mobilize broader segments of the population. As a consequence of this “socialization of conflict,” (Schattschneider 1960, p. 7) elites must look over their shoulders when negotiating international institutions and their normative foundations. Third, I observe substantial variation in elites’ public communication about IOs. The intensity and the tone with which elites evaluate IO legitimacy varies considerably across organizations, time, and space. Common to these puzzles is the question of what drives elites to legitimate or delegitimate IOs in the media, producing the patterns of elite legitimacy communication I observe.

This article offers a theoretical and empirical account of elites’ legitimacy communication in the media. Understanding the ebbs and flows of these legitimacy struggles is critical for the theory and practice of international cooperation for three main reasons. First, in times of contested multilateralism (Morse and Keohane 2014) and rising populist nationalism (Lake 2018) elites’ public support is a central currency to secure funding, influence, and effectiveness (Agné et al. 2018; Tallberg and Zürn 2017). Positive legitimacy assessments are instrumental in conveying IO missions and norms and help to bring IO governance targets into compliance (Hurd 1999; Steffek 2003). Conversely, a high frequency of negative assessments creates normative pressure, which may undermine IO authority (Zürn 2018). In mass democracies, the media constitutes a key arena in which elites compete with one another to promote their perception of IO legitimacy. Second, legitimacy communication affects citizens’ legitimacy perceptions. Since most citizens rarely have well-developed attitudes towards IOs (Dellmuth 2016), the intensity and tone with which elites debate IO legitimacy provide important cues for individual legitimacy beliefs. Mass media is a prominent channel by which citizens get these cues (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017). Finally, these legitimacy pressures have the potential to shape IOs’ institutional design, policy-making, and communication (Grigorescu 2015; Lenz and Viola 2017; Zürn 2018). Due to intensive elite delegitimation in the media major IOs, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have been motivated to open up to civil society (Tallberg et al. 2014), to accept democratic norms as guidance for their policy-making (Dingwerth et al. 2018), and to reform their public communication efforts (Ecker-Ehrhardt 2017).

Despite this importance of legitimacy communication in the media for international cooperation, we know little about systematic patterns in its intensity and tone. Notably, existing research offers few insights into why elites strongly contest the legitimacy of some IOs at specific points in time whereas others fly under the radar of legitimacy communication in the media. While research has begun to explore these questions for individual IOs (Binder and Heupel 2015), issue areas (O’Brien et al. 2000), specific elite actors (Ishiyama et al. 2015), and historical periods (Steffek 2015), the patterns of elite legitimacy communication in the media across IOs, different sets of elites, and over time have not been systematically examined.

Against this backdrop, this article makes two central contributions to the existing research. First, I offer a novel argument for why and when the intensity and tone of elite legitimacy communication in the media varies. I theorize that variation results from three sets of explanatory factors: the objective institutional features of IOs, national political cultures, and political events. I hypothesize that the level of authority transferred to IOs constitutes the impulse for elite communication and that national political cultures and political events, such as security crises and institutional reform, mediate the strength of this impulse.

Second, the article offers the first systematic comparative and longitudinal empirical study of the causal processes that shape elite communication on IO legitimacy in the media. The analysis builds on an original dataset covering elite legitimacy communication about three major, general-purpose IOs in the quality press of four western democracies between 1998 and 2013. Based on an extensive content analysis of roughly 6500 elite legitimacy evaluations published in more than 2500 newspaper articles, I identify the most profound patterns in the intensity and tone of elite communication across IOs, time, and space, and statistically test the hypotheses about their causes.

I begin by conceptualizing elite legitimacy communication and outlining my theoretical account. Second, I introduce the dataset and research design. Third, I present descriptive data on patterns in elite legitimacy communication in the media. I show that the analyzed IOs continuously confront elite evaluations of their legitimacy. These evaluations are largely critical but do not reveal a strong trend towards a nationalist backlash. Rather, legitimacy communication varies across IOs and over time. Fourth, I assess the explanatory power of the three theoretical accounts based on a multinomial logistic regression. The comparison of elite legitimacy communication in the media of four countries about only three IOs cannot prove the causal relationships between communication patterns, IO authority, national political cultures, and political events nor can it fully disentangle specific effects on communication tone and intensity. However, it allows me to test whether the observed patterns are consistent with my hypotheses. The aim is to demonstrate that the theoretical arguments made here are plausible explanations. Three findings stand out. First, in my limited sample, the intensity of elite communication in the media varies strongly with formal IO authority. Second, national political cultures, that is, the intensity and tone of elite legitimacy evaluations of domestic political systems, seem to have no effect. Third, the temporal fluctuations of elite communication result largely from political events. The final section concludes by laying out the implications of these results for research on IOs’ governance resources, the formation of citizens’ legitimacy perceptions, and institutional development in global governance.

I refer to elite legitimacy communication as the entirety of public statements evaluating the normative appropriateness of IOs as well as their basic institutions and principles made by actors whose strategic positions in society enable them to potentially influence political decision-making (Higley and Moore 2001, p. 176). These elites, including national executives and political parties, international bureaucrats, economic actors, and civil society organizations, are central actors in the political struggle about IO legitimacy as they “may be able to make their positive or negative support count more than high levels of support from unorganized millions” (Easton 1965, p. 167). Elites use this ability to evaluate IO legitimacy in the media for at least three reasons. First, to facilitate international cooperation IOs require a modicum of positive legitimacy perceptions among their members and their governance targets. Hence, IO supporters have incentives to provide communicative support, whereas opponents may use public legitimacy evaluations to discredit IOs. Second, both governments and private actors tend to use IOs for camouflage. Scapegoating IOs in the media to deflect criticism for unpopular policies and outcomes is likely to trigger negative legitimacy evaluations. By contrast, laundering the “dirty work” of governments and business (Abbott and Snidal 1998, p. 167; Vaubel 1986, p. 49), such as the provision of foreign aid in exchange for cooperation (Lim and Vreeland 2013) or decisions to go to war (Chapman 2009), should go hand in hand with positive legitimacy evaluations. Third, in many western democracies, IOs have become an important issue in party competition. Since international integration has become politicized (Hooghe and Marks 2009; Zürn et al. 2012) political parties have incentives to present their positions on IOs by publicly evaluating their legitimacy.

In mass democracies, the privileged arena for these legitimacy struggles is the news media. They constitute the public sphere and link its various arenas. As such, news media serve as direct communication channels between citizens, elites, and IOs, and give voice to positive legitimacy evaluations of IO supporters and criticism from their opponents (Baum and Potter 2008; Bennett and Entman 2001). Consequently, elites engaged with IOs and their legitimacy try to gain public support through the news media and to position their legitimacy evaluations in this highly visible format (Kriesi et al. 2012, p. 39). Exposure to such evaluations in the news media has the potential to affect citizens’ perceptions of IO legitimacy, to mobilize their political engagement, and consequently to shape national agendas (King et al. 2017).

I conceptualize elite legitimacy communication in the media as having two dimensions, namely (a) the intensity of communication and (b) its tone. Intensity indicates the frequency of elite legitimacy evaluations in the media. It reveals that elites are attentive to IO legitimacy and that they feel the need to take communicative action. More intensive communication makes IOs publicly visible, provides them with focality, and eventually helps them governing by communicative means (Barnett and Finnemore 2004). In addition, intensive communication informs IOs about the legitimacy standards they are expected to meet and signals the importance of individual IOs to citizens. This focus on intensity breaks with previous scholarship on legitimacy evaluations, which assumes that IO legitimacy matters to elites and focuses exclusively on tone and sources of legitimacy (for instance, Dellmuth and Tallberg 2015; Schlipphak 2015). Yet, if we do not know whether legitimacy questions are at all pertinent to elites, answers to these latter questions are difficult to interpret.

The tone of legitimacy evaluations informs us about the most critical content of elite communication in the media. Do they question or support IO legitimacy? Positive tone signals normative support and adds to IOs’ focality. Negative tone indicates that elites perceive a mismatch between their legitimacy standards and IOs’ institutional design, purpose, or policymaking. It may foreshadow a legitimacy crisis which forces adaptation or even disempowerment (Zürn 2018). Due to the importance of intensity and tone I consider both dimensions jointly and distinguish four patterns of elite legitimacy communication.

Low-intensity legitimation (bottom-right in Table 1) and high-intensity delegitimation (top-left) mark the extremes in both dimensions. The former corresponds to Lindberg and Scheingold’s (1970, p. 41) notion of a “permissive consensus” frequently used to capture how International Relations scholars have tended to describe the legitimacy of IOs in the past. It indicates that elites take IOs for granted and therefore do not engage much in legitimacy communication (Suchman 1995, p. 583). To the extent that elites evaluate IO legitimacy in the media, tone is positive. This pattern is unlikely to create legitimacy pressure on IOs as their representatives rarely confront demand for change and normative adaptation in public debates. The opposite pattern of high-intensity delegitimation matches the notion of “constraining dissensus,” Hooghe and Marks (2009) use to describe the growing contestation of European integration. This pattern is more likely to put IOs under normative stress as they have to deal with mounting media attention, face various demands for change, and come under pressure to reform procedures and to improve performance (Lenz and Viola 2017). These pressures may also follow from low-intensity delegitimation albeit to a lesser extent because legitimacy challenges are less frequent and can be ignored more easily. Finally, high-intensity legitimation describes a situation in which proponents of IOs are willing to support IOs actively by voicing their positive legitimacy evaluations in the media. This pattern is likely to encourage IOs to maintain their course.

Little is known about the determinants of these patterns. What drives elites to discuss IO legitimacy in the media? Why do elites publicly legitimate or delegitimate IOs? To address these questions, I draw on three bundles of explanatory factors highlighted by Tallberg and Zürn (2017): the formal authority of IOs, national political cultures, and political events. The varying levels of IO authority give an impulse for legitimacy communication. Yet, authority is socially constructed and therefore likely to be viewed differently across national public spheres and concrete political contexts. Hence, I expect the impact of authority levels on elite communication to be mediated by national political cultures and political events. In the following paragraphs, I develop the theoretical argument and derive testable hypotheses.

The authority explanation is rooted in the Weberian notion that political authority is the analytical starting point for questions of legitimacy (Weber 1978). Following this tradition, legitimacy is often defined as an actors’ normative belief that a rule or institution ought to be obeyed (Hurd 1999, p. 381). This implies that demand for legitimacy and legitimation grows, with authority (Zürn 2018). This causal link was a key driver for the formation of the modern nation-state, where the accumulation of the authority to make and enforce collectively binding decisions by the state sparked elite demands for participation and representation (Tilly 1990). More recently, research on the politicization of international institutions (Zürn et al. 2012) has demonstrated a similar relationship between international authority and public legitimacy evaluations. Increasing IO authority drives the growing intensity of public debates about IOs and shapes their tone (Rauh and Zürn 2017; Rixen and Zangl 2013). This research defines authority as a “social contract in which a governor provides a political order of value to a community in exchange for compliance by the governed with the rules necessary to produce that order” (Lake 2010, p. 587). For IOs, this social contract is found in the formal rules that specify (a) the issue scope in which the IO is granted authority, (b) the tasks of political order making delegated directly to international bodies, and (c) the decision-making capacity of member states pooled in joint international bodies (Hooghe et al. 2017, p. 22). Three mechanisms link this authority to elite’s legitimacy communication in the media. Most fundamentally, authority makes IOs more newsworthy. IOs that operate in many issue areas and have a high level of pooled and delegated authority create more occasions for the media to report on their activities and, thus, for elites to discuss legitimacy questions. Elites seize these opportunities for two basic reasons. First, systems of authority and their representatives attempt to establish and cultivate the belief in their legitimacy (Barker 2001; Claude 1966). Consequently, IO representatives and government actors seek to justify their organizations in the media (Zaum 2013). Second, those subject to IO authority put forward their normative demands in exchange for compliance. They are likely to question IO legitimacy in the media because international public authorities have the capacity to restrict freedom, which makes justification necessary. Overall, this combination of motive and opportunity implies that:

IO authority should also have an effect on tone. Since IO policy-making does no longer stop at national borders but tackles core functions of sovereign government, national elites are more frequently confronted with the direct – often redistributive – effects of IO decision-making (Barnett and Finnemore 2004, p. 1; Kreuder-Sonnen and Zangl 2015). Over the course of the past decade, this empowerment of IOs has been met with opposition from two fronts. First, not only since the election of Donald Trump and the British vote to leave the EU, we witness a new integration-demarcation cleavage, mobilizing nationalist backlash against international integration (Burgoon 2009; Kriesi et al. 2012). Because economic globalization has produced losers (Fordham and Kleinberg 2012) and because IO authority threatens national political identities (Hooghe and Marks 2009) nationalist elites have come to challenge the legitimacy of globalization and its political institutions. Second, beginning in the 1990s, the global justice movement emerged as a powerful contester of IO legitimacy (della Porta 2007; O’Brien et al. 2000). Focusing on the redistributive and ecological consequences of IO policy-making, civil society and left-wing parties have challenged IOs’ role in enforcing global capitalism and US imperialism (Woods 2006). In sum, these right and left-wing critics of IOs’ growing authority constitute a strong opposition, which should shape the overall tone of elite legitimacy communication in the media (Zürn 2018). Therefore, I hypothesize that:

While IO legitimacy may even engage observers in non-member states, I expect particularly strong effects of IO authority on the legitimacy communication of elites based in IO member states. Consequently, high-intensity delegitimation is most likely for constituencies of IOs with high authority. Low-intensity legitimation is most likely for observers of IOs that exercise little authority.

My second explanation builds on the literature highlighting the role of political cultures and discursive institutionalism (Schmidt 2010). It assumes that the media as the primary arena of elite legitimacy communication have largely conserved their national character (Risse 2010; Schneider et al. 2010). Consequently, the effect of IO authority on elite communication should be mediated by national political cultures. The literature on the Europeanization and transnationalization of public spheres has provided ample evidence for the tenacity of such cultures (Peters 2005; Risse 2010). Another pertinent literature explores the relationship between legitimacy evaluations of domestic political systems and IOs. It reveals that individuals often draw on their experience with domestic political authority as cues for their evaluation of international authority (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2015; Torgler 2008). This effect has been confirmed for the EU. Individuals with higher levels of trust in domestic political institutions are also more likely to trust European institutions (Armingeon and Ceka 2014; Harteveld et al. 2013). I expect this mechanism to shape national variation in elite legitimacy communication. Political cultures, which tend to regularly scrutinize and debate the political authority of the state and, thus, examine the issue of legitimacy more intensely in the media, should also pay more attention to IO legitimacy. Thus, I hypothesize that:

Theoretical perspectives and empirical findings on tone are more mixed. On the one hand, survey research has demonstrated that IO legitimacy evaluations are based on actors’ general confidence in political institutions. Premised on cue theory, this research shows that actors use their evaluation of domestic institutions’ legitimacy as short-cuts to form opinions about IO legitimacy. In this mechanism, a general predisposition, that is, the appreciation or rejection of political authority, rather than the characteristics of IOs shapes the tone of elites’ legitimacy communication (Armingeon and Ceka 2014; Dellmuth and Tallberg 2015). On the other hand, research on the politicization of international institutions has shown that political identities shape cross-country variance in IO legitimacy evaluations (Zürn et al. 2012). In this mechanism, growing IO authority constitutes a significant loss to actors “who possess a strong sense of identification with their national community,” (Kriesi et al. 2012, p. 15) whereas actors with a cosmopolitan identity evaluate international authority as legitimate (Ecker-Ehrhardt 2012). In aggregate, this mechanism creates more positive elite communication about IOs in the media of societies which see domestic institutions critically due to their cosmopolitan outlook and more critical communication about IO legitimacy in countries which value domestic institutions highly due to their nationalist culture. As both mechanisms of upward extrapolation and identification may plausibly affect elite legitimacy communication in the media, it is an open empirical question whether legitimacy evaluations of domestic political systems have a positive or negative effect on the tone of communication about IO legitimacy. Hence, I hypothesize more openly that:

My third explanation focuses on political events as discursive opportunities for the mobilization of support or challenges to IO legitimacy in the media (Chong and Druckman 2007; Snow and Benford 1988). The argument draws on the notion that the development of ideational constructs about standards of appropriateness is a collective, self-reinforcing process (Pierson 2004, p. 39), which is generally marked by path-dependence. Yet, this process can be interrupted by critical junctures, that is, political events and crises that create uncertainty as to the future of institutional arrangements and, thus, allow for political agency and choice to play a decisive role in setting paths for future developments (Capoccia 2015, p. 148). Since authority relationships in global governance are less deeply entrenched and taken for granted than at the national level, elites are more prone to react to such events and to engage in more volatile legitimacy communication (Zürn 2018, p. 62). Consequently, the political events, in which legitimacy communication in the media is embedded, should shape both the intensity and tone of elites’ legitimacy evaluations (Imerman 2018). When a specific event, such as the Great Recession or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, shift to the front burner of media agendas, they are likely to focus elite attention on particular legitimacy resources or challenges of IOs and to invite affirmative or critical evaluations.

Two types of events are particularly likely to affect legitimacy communication: First, I expect international security crises to trigger a “rally around the flag effect” among political elites. As IOs are widely credited with comparative advantages in providing the public good of international security (Cottrel 2016), international security crises should create support for IO legitimacy, including more intensive and positive elite evaluations in the media. Second, political events highlighting institutional features and IO authority rather than the policy responsibilities of IOs are likely to foreground potential legitimacy challenges. Following up on the above discussion on how growing IO authority shapes legitimacy communication, I expect this effect to unfold during periods of actual authority transfer. When IO treaty reforms highlight institutional features and IO authority, elite communication in the media should become more intensive and less positive. In sum, I hypothesize that:

This section explains the IO and country sample, outlines the content-analytical method used to map elite legitimacy communication in the media, and operationalizes dependent and independent variables.

This article examined elite communication in the media of established democracies about the legitimacy of major multi-purpose IOs. This legitimacy communication matters for three reasons. First, elites’ support in the media is important for the effectiveness of IOs and for national governments engaging in international cooperation. Second, citizens draw on elite cues presented in the media to form legitimacy beliefs. Third, the legitimacy pressure resulting from high-intensity delegitimation might drive IOs to reconcile their institutional design and policy-making with the legitimacy standards held dear by elites. Based on a dataset that captures the intensity and tone of elite legitimacy communication on three IOs in the media of four western democracies between 1998 and 2013, I make descriptive and causal inferences on the contours and determinants of patterns of elite legitimacy communication.

My argument can be summarized in terms of two principal conclusions. First, major IOs cannot rely on a permissive elite consensus on global governance and its normative foundations. Instead, they face continuous elite communication about their legitimacy in the media. This communication is generally critical and puts, at times, firm legitimacy pressure on IOs. Yet, the strength of this pressure varies across IOs and alternates with communicative support. While the EU frequently confronts high-intensity delegitimation, the UN more often experiences communicative support.

Second, for the limited sample of IOs and countries presented here, variation in patterns of elite communication is best explained by a combination of two principal factors. Formal IO authority accounts for variance in communication intensity across IOs and countries as more powerful IOs attract more elite communication. Political contexts and events help to explain the ebbs and flows of intensity and tone. Together, these factors account for elites’ normative support for and pressure on IOs in the media. Further research, extending the data basis to other types of IOs, countries, and public arenas will be needed to establish the generalizability of these findings.

Beyond these results, the article generates implications for three areas of research on IOs. The first is the literature on IOs’ indirect modes of governance (Abbott et al. 2016; Andonova 2017) highlighting that IOs can enhance their governance capacity by drawing on the capabilities of third parties. When IOs and elites have common goals, they can join forces and use their complementary capabilities. In this context, elites can offer access to relevant constituencies, material and personnel resources, and legitimacy (Abbott et al. 2015, p. 21). Regarding the latter, I observe that elites’ communicative support in the media is rather rare and volatile. Consequently, western elites’ communicative support in the media appears to be a governance resource of limited use for major IOs.

Second, the article carries implications for research on citizens’ legitimacy perceptions of global governance. Elite cues published in the media and national political cultures are identified as central determinants of individual legitimacy beliefs (Schlipphak 2015; Torgler 2008). More specifically, citizens tend to have more negative beliefs about IO legitimacy, when they regularly receive negative evaluations of IO legitimacy by domestic political elites and civil society actors (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017). My findings suggest that in western societies the effect of elite cues is likely to be stronger for high-authority IOs and for citizens in IO member states as high-intensity delegitimation, which should have the strongest effect on citizens, occurs more often in the media if IOs are powerful. Furthermore, as western elites’ legitimacy communication in the media is not shaped by perceptions of domestic systems’ legitimacy but by a common understanding of legitimacy in global governance, elite cues should help to level strong cross-country differences in citizens’ beliefs over time.

Finally, my results have implications for the literature on institutional development in global governance (Fioretos 2011; Lipscy 2015). While both historical and rational choice institutionalism tend to highlight the reasons for IOs’ resistance to change (Hawkins et al. 2006; Koremenos et al. 2001), more recent studies have shown that firm legitimacy pressures drive IOs to adapt their institutional designs to normative demands (Zürn 2018; Lenz and Viola 2017). My findings suggest that such periods of high-intensity delegitimation in the media, potentially forcing IOs to reconcile their institutions with normative demand are rather rare. Clearly, high-intensity delegitimation is a common pattern in elite legitimacy communication. Yet, elites from different countries rarely agree on their evaluations at a given point in time. During the period of analysis, there are only two years in which all four national spheres exert high legitimacy pressures on an IO. In all other years, high-intensity delegitimation by some national elites is countered by high-intensity legitimation by others. Consequently, western elites’ communication in the media, more often than not, signals conflicting evaluations and demands to IOs. Furthermore, high-intensity delegitimation, like the three other patterns of elite communication, fluctuates strongly over time. Assuming that institutional adaptation is often a slow-moving process, which requires continuous pressure over an extended period (Grigorescu 2015), my results indicate that legitimacy pressure in the media is likely to shape institutional development only under specific conditions, including a high level of IO authority and conductive political events that keep IO legitimacy on the media agenda.