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 individuals’ dispositional empathy shapes their legitimacy beliefs toward IOs directly and indirectly through political ideology, and through which mechanisms individual's ideological proximity with IOs will moderate the relationship between dispositional empathy and legitimacy belief towards IOs. This paper posits that individuals with higher empathy level generally have higher legitimacy beliefs towards IOs. However, they may reduce their legitimacy beliefs towards IOs with Right/TAN-orientated missions. The opposite is true for individuals with lower dispositional empathy level. 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.