In global governance, not only constituent members of an international organization (IO) hold beliefs about its legitimacy. External audiences, including governments and citizens of non-member states, civil society groups, and other supranational actors, may have higher or lower confidence or trust in an institution than its constituent audience, and when IOs undergo a legitimacy crisis, they are often under pressure from stakeholders without institutionalized bonds. Whereas evidence exists that legitimacy beliefs and attempts to delegitimate IOs vary between internal and external audiences, we know little on how such differences, and outsider views in general, matter for IOs. Legitimacy has traditionally been conceived of as a key ingredient for political institutions to perform effectively, but most theories are silent on the relevance of outsider effects. In this paper, we address the question of when and how legitimacy beliefs of non-constituent audiences have consequences for the targeted institutions.
Conceptually, we introduce a framework for the analysis of non-constituent audiences that goes beyond the existing dichotomization and accounts for systematic differences in the relation between an external audience and an IO. We distinguish IO-outsider relations according to dimensions such as dependence, competition, cooperation, and neutrality. On this basis, we develop theoretical expectations on how consequences of legitimacy vary across different types of non-constituent audiences, and for a range of different consequences, including resourcing, organizational reforms, and inter-organizational relations.
Empirically, we apply this framework to the analysis of 16 IOs between 1985 to 2015. In combination with existing survey data and case study evidence on legitimacy beliefs of external audiences, a new media-based measure of elite critique and mass protests will be used to systematically map external attempts to delegitimate IOs. On the basis of the quantitative analysis, we illustrate the effects of legitimacy for two case vignettes with different forms of non-constituent involvement.
