Democratic Legitimation and Regional Organization

What explains variation in the use of a democratic narratives as a legitimation strategy of regional international organizations (RIOs)? The global popularity of democracy appears to be in decline with the rise of China as a superpower and dissatisfaction with democracy within the core states of the liberal international order, for which democracy is a key pillar. Yet, we show that democracy remains a popular normative standard that RIOs use in their legitimation discourse. A novel dataset on the legitimation discourse of 28 RIOs in the period from 1980 until today demonstrates that the use of democratic legitimation continuously rose between 1980 and the early 2000s, when it seems to have reached a plateau. At the same time, we show that while there is much variation in the use of democratic rhetoric across RIOs, such legitimation discourse has gained in importance in most RIOs over time, especially in largely non-democratic Africa and Asia. In order to explain temporal and cross-sectional variation, we test hypotheses derived from theories of strategic legitimation and diffusion against a “genuine democratic legitimation” null hypothesis.