The role of nonstate actors for the legitimacy of global governance institutions

Nonstate actors play powerful roles in global governance institutions (GGIs) – as advocates, experts, representatives, regulators, monitors or implementing agents. However, the extent to which citizens find such participation of nonstate actors desirable in order to enhance institutional legitimacy has not been systematically investigated, nor for what reasons citizens might do so. In this paper, we argue that citizens’ preferences for nonstate actor inclusion depend on what contributions they expect the nonstate actors to make to the governing process when participating: expertise, representation, public interest orientation, operational capacities, and/or transparency. Additionally, we expect that the demand for these governance contributions varies across structural aspects of a GGI such as technical complexity and distributional consequences of policy, stages of the regulatory process, and whether governments are on board. Thus, we expect that these structural aspects moderate the degree to which citizens' judgement of nonstate actor participation depends on certain expected governance contributions. To investigate the explanatory power of this theoretical argument, the paper draws on a series of large-N survey experiments with citizens from the US, South Africa, Brazil, and Germany.