ELITE POLARISATION AND THE LEGITIMACY OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATIONS

Abstract

The ability of international organisations to address transboundary challenges largely hinges on their perceived legitimacy among state actors and the global citizenry. While existing research has successfully uncovered a range of individual-level factors explaining variation in citizens’ legitimacy beliefs towards international organisations, limited attention has been paid to the political contexts in which citizens are situated and, more specifically, to the role of party elites in shaping public opinion. The thesis seeks to address this knowledge gap by investigating whether the level of elite polarisation on international cooperation influences citizens’ perceptions of the United Nations (UN). It applies multilevel regression analysis to 45 countries from different geographical regions, leveraging combined public opinion data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, and election manifesto data from the Manifesto Project Database. Findings reveal that elite polarisation holds a limited impact on citizens’ perceptions at the aggregated level. Yet, at the individual level, results suggest a moderating effect of elite polarisation on how citizens form their perceptions of international organisations; citizens are more influenced by party cues when elite polarisation is low. What is more, results indicate that the strength of this effect is conditioned on the level of political interest, with individuals reporting higher levels of interest being more prone to follow party heuristics. Collectively, these findings contribute to an initial understanding of how domestic political dynamics feed into international governance, paving the way for future research that explores how party elites shape popular legitimacy of international organisations.