The Sources of Discursive Legitimation in International Organizations

What are the sources of an international organization’s (IO) discursive legitimation? In this paper, we challenge the existing literature’s focus on the strategic sources of IO legitimation by examining novel data on the democratic legitimation of 28 regional IOs in the period from 1980 until 2019 – a type of IO that faces particular incentives to construct legitimation communication strategically. We argue that socialization and isomorphic legitimation provide theoretically coherent and hitherto neglected alternatives and assess the respective relevance of these general sources of discursive legitimation. Using multilevel regression analysis, we show that all three models offer important insights into IOs’ discursive legitimation. Specifically, the normative convictions of member states and high-level international bureaucrats (socialization legitimation), strategic considerations induced by institutional design and public politicization (strategic legitimation), and geographic diffusion (isomorphic legitimation) all shape IOs’ democratic legitimation discourse. However, the explanatory power of the socialization legitimation model appears to be stronger than that of the strategic and isomorphic models. These results show that the literature’s focus on strategic legitimation is not entirely wrong-headed but neglects other important, sometimes even more important, sources of discursive legitimation.