Measuring Public Perceptions of International Organisations’ Legitimacy

There is increasing opprobrium from societal actors (e.g. businesses, nongovernmental organizations) over the policies and decision-making modes of international organizations. This raises the question about how the empowerment of international organizations affects public opinion in terms of their political attitudes as well as citizens’ legitimacy perceptions towards these international organizations. This paper designs and validates a measure to assess public legitimacy perceptions of international organizations in order to empirically test the effects of international organization politicisation. This measure improves upon existing approaches by combining multiple dimensions of legitimacy. We conceptualise legitimacy, as a latent concept, comprised of five constructs identified from the literature: social affinity, trust, confidence, fairness and obligation. This paper introduces a 21-item questionnaire where each question acts as an indicator for one of the constructs. To validate our measure, we ran focus groups to identify a legitimate and illegitimate international organization. We then conducted an online survey using the 21-item measure on the international organizations identified in the focus groups. Using two statistical item-aggregation techniques, structural equation modelling and item response theory, we evaluate statistically whether and to what degree the latent “legitimacy” concept is actually explained by each of the theory-driven traits. Based on the explanatory weights, we construct a single latent measure of the sociological legitimacy of international organizations.