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. 2022;17(4):877-898.
doi: 10.1007/s11558-021-09452-y. Epub 2022 Feb 11.

Crisis affectedness, elite cues and IO public legitimacy

Bernd Schlipphak  1 , Paul Meiners  1 , Osman Sabri Kiratli  2
Affiliations

Crisis affectedness, elite cues and IO public legitimacy

Bernd Schlipphak et al. Rev Int Organ. 2022.

Abstract

What effects do international crises have on the public legitimacy of International Organizations (IOs)? Deviating from previous research, we argue that such crises make those international organizations more salient that are mandated to solve the respective crisis. This results in two main effects. First, the public legitimacy of those IOs becomes more dependent on citizens' crisis-induced worries, leading to a more positive view of those IOs. Second, as the higher salience also leads to higher levels of elite communication regarding IOs, elite blaming of the IOs during crises results in direct negative effects on public legitimacy beliefs on IOs. Finally, both the valence and content of the elite discourse additionally moderate the positive effects of crisis-induced worries. Implementing survey experiments on public legitimacy beliefs on the WHO during the COVID-19 crisis with about 4400 respondents in Austria, Germany and Turkey, we find preliminary evidence for the expectations derived from our salience argument. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for future research on IO legitimacy and IO legitimation.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11558-021-09452-y.

Keywords: Elite cues; IO legitimacy; International crisis; Public legitimacy; Public opinion; Survey experiment.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interestsThis work was supported by Tubitak, Grant no. 120K600. The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
WHO salience during the COVID-19 pandemic
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Histogram of the dependent variable by country
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Interaction of the frame treatment and COVID-19 Affectedness (95% Confidence intervals)
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Interaction of the tone treatment and COVID-19 Affectedness (95% Confidence intervals)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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