The legitimacy of non-authoritarian polities rests – more than on other things – on the ‘space-sets’ of the persons on whom they stake their claims. A ‘space-set’ can be defined as the complex of physical sites where individuals spend their social existence. We contend that space-sets and political legitimacy are intimately linked phenomena: wider space-sets tend to generate legitimacy for wider territorial polities. The European Union is a test case. Using Eurobarometer data, we find that EU citizens with Europe-wide space-sets are also significantly more inclined than the rest of the population to legitimise the European Union. When introducing an index of Europeanised space-sets in models of EU support, this factor turns out to explain more variance than all others which are highlighted in the existing literature – such as age, education and left-right orientations. Thus, our argument is empirically corroborated. Not only ‘distance from the centre’ affects the popular support polities manage to get, which was also found to be true for the EU (Berezin and Díez Medrano 2008), but also people’s familiarity with these polities’ overall space is a crucial component of legitimacy.
