Explaining Legitimacy and Institutional Trust from the Perspectives of Citizens and Elites: The Case of the Czech Senate

When assessing the nature and strength of bicameralism, political scientists have traditionally focused on the powers of upper chambers and potential in/congruence with a lower chamber. More recently, the legitimacy of upper chambers has been recognized as an important third factor. The current debate concerns how to understand and measure the legitimacy of upper chambers. Part of this debate is also how perceived legitimacy and trust are related. Few studies have attempted to measure the legitimacy of upper chambers quantitatively. However, the authors of these studies themselves state that this is an imperfect approach (among other things, this approach places too much emphasis on the way the institution is elected) and that the best way to determine perceived legitimacy would be to directly 1) ask the member of an institution themselves and 2) the citizens of the country. That is what we do in our research. Therefore, our paper first discusses what can influence the perceived legitimacy of political institutions. Specifically, we describe input, throughput, and output legitimacy in the context of upper chambers. At the same time, we discuss the theory of institutional trust building. We then apply this theoretical background to the case of the Czech bicameralism. We conducted two rounds of semi-structured interviews. First, with 30 citizens (the Senate voters and non-voters) and then with 14 senators. The group of citizens is diverse in all basic socio-economical characteristics, and the group of senators is also diverse (it includes senators from different parties, different types of constituencies, etc.). Interviews within both groups proceeded till the point of saturation. Besides perceived legitimacy, we also focused during interviews on how citizens' trust in the Senate is built (compared to other institutions) and how this relates to the perceived legitimacy of the institution. Our aim is not only to explain what factors influence the perceived legitimacy of upper chambers and how citizens' perceived legitimacy and trust are related but also to show how the perceived legitimacy differs between ordinary citizens and the institution's members. Interviews are currently being subjected to qualitative content analysis. However, it is already clear that there are significant differences between the perceived legitimacy of citizens and senators. Preliminary results also suggest that input legitimacy (such as democratic legitimacy gained through direct election) is not as important as the attention given to it in existing research. Regarding institutional trust, we found that an integral part of the concept of trust in a political institution should be the popularity of the politicians who represent the institution. We also argue that how institutional trust is formed depends on the type of institution – distrust in the Czech Senate, for instance, is significantly influenced by the unfamiliarity and distance of the institution. Therefore, citizens cannot evaluate the individual outputs of an institution and often do not even know the specific politicians. However, this changes with other institutions, such as the lower chamber.