(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
Since World War II, international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization have played an important coordinating role across continents. But foreign-policy observers have noted that such organizations increasingly struggle to influence geopolitics and maintain order, especially as countries and regional blocs vie for control in a turbulent post-Cold War era.
One potential factor is the gap in support for such organizations that exists between national publics and elites. While the governing class in many countries is eager to work with these agencies, citizens at large trust them far less. Populist demagogues have been able to exploit this mistrust to cut funding for international cooperation and encourage their constituents to disparage these organizations along with the entire project of globalism.
A group of European researchers set out to understand why this discrepancy in support for international organizations exists between elites and the public at large. Their new paper, “The Elite-Citizen Gap in International Organization Legitimacy,” confirms that the gap is a problem around the world. “Our findings suggest that deep-seated differences between elites and general publics may present major challenges for democratic and effective international cooperation,” the researchers write.
The authors—Lisa Dellmuth, an associate professor of economic history and international relations at Stockholm University; Jan Aart Scholte, a professor at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University; Jonas Tallberg, a professor of political science at Stockholm; and Soetkin Verhaegen, an assistant professor of political science at Maastricht University—used surveys to examine attitudes in five countries. They looked at how people in Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, and the United States felt about six major global NGOs: the International Criminal Court, International Monetary Fund, United Nations, World Bank, World Health Organization, and World Trade Organization.
To understand how regular people think about these groups, the researchers had custom questions placed into the World Values Survey (WVS-7), conducted from 2017 to 2019. At the same time, they asked similar questions of elite respondents in each of the five countries, focusing on members of the high-status bureaucratic, business, civil society, media, political, and research sectors.
The study found that a gulf does exist between elites and citizens on the legitimacy of international organizations, and it persists across all of the different types of elite strata, all the NGOs studied, and four of the five countries, with the Philippines being an outlier. The paper further finds that four individual-level characteristics drive the disparities: socioeconomic status, political values, geographical identification, and domestic institutional trust, although the researchers find that “contextual circumstances” in each country led to a different effect for each of these factors.
The political and social situation in each country is nuanced, so it’s necessary to consider the elite-citizen divide in the place where it occurs, Dellmuth says. That’s particularly important in a world where populism has become more widespread and is gaining victories at the ballot box; several of the countries in the survey have elected populist or nationalist leaders. Those working on strengthening international organizations could use this research to help start a conversation about the legitimacy gap, rather than leaving the field of discourse to populist politicians, says Dellmuth, noting that while the discrepancy between elite and citizen confidence in NGOs appears in all the countries in the survey, a large percentage of both population sectors does believe in the organizations.
“Legitimacy is such an important topic, especially for international organizations,” Dellmuth says. “If they want to be successful in spreading norms and inviting governments to come with ambitious policy solutions, they need legitimacy, and they need the broader public to regard them as legitimate.”
The paper surfaces important findings and further questions about why the governing classes don’t understand the rest of the population’s disdain for NGOs and their work, says Stefanie Walter, a professor of international relations and political economy at the University of Zurich.
“The finding, that elites and individuals consistently differ in how legitimate they view international organizations, despite all these differences, points to a systematic challenge for international organizations,” Walter says. “This article pushes research on the backlash against globalization forward not just methodologically, but also theoretically, as it provides a new perspective on why elites might be unresponsive to citizen demands for more [international organization] legitimacy.”
The answer is a continued dialogue about how each country contributes to the international order, Dellmuth says.
“The solution is always to talk to each other and try to understand each other,” she says. “We can’t leave this discussion to the populists who claim that international organizations undermine democracy and the will of the people.”
Lisa Dellmuth, Jan Aart Scholte, Jonas Tallberg, and Soetkin Verhaegen, “The Elite-Citizen Gap in International Organization Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review, vol. 116, no. 1, 2022, pp. 283-300.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.