A Cross-National Study of Perceived Legitimacy: What Factors Matter in the Evaluation of Governments in Different Political Contexts?

Does justice matter for citizens` evaluations of political authorities? Research into perceived legitimacy of police and courts showed that procedural and distributive justice play an important role in granting legitimacy to authorities in the Western democratic context. This paper is based on a cross-national vignette experiment testing the influence of procedural and distributive justice on evaluations of a government. One of many identified criteria of procedural justice will be analysed here, namely the extent to which the opportunities for representation—voice—were provided (Tyler 1988). The distributive justice in this paper refers to the allocation of benefits. Moreover, two additional factors are manipulated in the vignette: dependence on governmental help and personal outcome (positive versus negative). The vignette experiment was a part of a survey conducted with students socialized in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, The Netherlands, and France. As socialization in different political contexts is expected to have an effect on the ideas about political mechanism and justice, several hypotheses about the impact of the above mentioned factors on the evaluations of governments in old democracies, new democracies, and non-democratic regimes were tested. Among others, the role of procedural justice was expected to have a stronger effect on legitimacy in old democracies, while self-interest was expected to have a stronger effect in non-democracies. In addition, around 300 respondents per country answered an open question about their understanding of legitimacy: they named characteristics of legitimate authorities (input and output) and what they consider the most important tasks of political authorities (output legitimacy). The open questions about legitimacy helped to understand whether and how the ideas about legitimacy differ. This paper puts popular perceptions of political processes in comparative perspective and provides insights into understandings of legitimacy. In this way, the paper touches upon questions of political psychology and folk political philosophy.