Dispositional Empathy, Political Ideology, and Legitimacy Beliefs of International Organizations

Building on research on empathy’s political effects and international organization’s (IO) legitimacy, this paper examines how dispositional empathy, through political ideology, shapes individuals’ legitimacy beliefs toward IOs, and through which mechanisms individual's ideological proximity with IOs will moderate this relationship. It posits that higher empathy level generally raises perceptions of IO legitimacy, but the support falls for right/TAN-oriented IOs. High- and low-empathy individuals may equally show “selective legitimation” toward ideologically opposite IOs via different mechanisms: the former through negative reciprocity and more situational, the latter through system justification beliefs and more essentialist. Using cross-national observational and experimental surveys, including a two-step vignette experiment, the paper will test these hypotheses in various cultural contexts and uncover underlying mechanisms for the “selective legitimation” among individuals with different empathy level and political ideology, offering novel insights from political psychology’s perspective about public opinion factors contributing to IO legitimacy crisis and political polarization as empathy becomes politically contested.