How Do Attitudes Towards International Organizations Develop?

To explain the recent public contestation of International Organizations (IOs), researchers have often looked for micro-level explanations. Research has demonstrated that a variety of factors influence attitudes towards IOs, ranging from characteristics of IOs themselves and the consequences of IO activity to contestation by political elites. However, empirical studies have not tested competing explanations integrated into one common framework. Furthermore, it is unclear, if people hold stable attitudes towards IOs given the high complexity of the issue and the absence of IO influence in most everyday life experiences (Dellmuth 2016). Therefore, I propose to take a step back and rethink the process of attitude formation towards IOs from a social psychology perspective. Using the latest iteration of dual-process theories of attitude formation (Evans & Stanovich 2013), I argue that the effects of the proposed explanatory factors interact with each other and that they are conditional on individual psychological characteristics. Many factors such as heuristics and elite cues contribute to attitude formation through a fast and intuitive process, whereas information on the characteristics of IOs requires a reflective process (Arceneaux & Vander Wielen 2017). When intuitive pathways of attitude formation are present, other pathways will lose their effect depending on the individual propensity to engage in reflective thinking. Such a dual-process approach is especially appropriate in the context of IOs, where public information is rare and of low quality and where information processing is more cognitively demanding than in other contexts. In this study, I concentrate on the impact of thinking dispositions on the propensity to follow partisan cues and the probability of the "uploading" of trust in domestic politics to the international level (Anderson 1998). These two intuitive pathways are very likely to be present when people encounter information about IOs in the real world. I expect that the presence of these pathways will reduce the effect of informational content about IOs which requires reflective processing, depending on individual thinking dispositions. To test these expectations, I conduct a factorial survey experiment using a representative sample of the German population, exposing participants to multiple fictitious IOs, their basic characteristics and the reactions of domestic political elites. To deductively test competing theories, factorial survey experiments are an appropriate tool because researchers can include many different factors without sacrificing statistical efficiency. The results from this experiment can help trace the reasons behind the politicization of IOs, by showing the extent and the limits of elite cue influences. Understanding why people have similar levels of trust in different levels of government can also advance research on the social legitimacy of IOs. Furthermore, the results can potentially help us rethink the way information about IOs should be communicated in the public sphere. Instead of trying to defuse politicization through technocratic language, it might be best to stimulate people to be more reflective about IOs.