Affective Legitimacy: How Emotional Signaling Shapes Citizens’ Evaluations of Public Institutions

For Panel 10: Affect in Regulatory Governance How do citizens evaluate the legitimacy of non-majoritarian public institutions in politically contested and emotionally charged policy environments? Existing scholarship on bureaucratic responsiveness and legitimacy has primarily emphasized cognitive mechanisms of evaluation, focusing on compliance with professional standards, scientific expertise, and formal independence from political principals. Building on legitimacy theory, Affective Intelligence Theory (AIT), and emerging work on affective governance, this study advances an affective account of bureaucratic legitimacy by theorizing citizens’ legitimacy evaluations as jointly shaped by cognitive and emotional processes. We argue that non-majoritarian institutions do not rely solely on competence-based or technocratic signals to sustain legitimacy, but also strategically deploy affective cues that activate emotional appraisals central to how citizens interpret institutional authority. Drawing on AIT, we theorize that emotional signaling conditions citizens’ information processing, influencing how factual and scientific information is received, interpreted, and translated into legitimacy judgments. Affective cues are therefore not peripheral, but constitutive of legitimacy evaluations, particularly under conditions of political contestation and uncertainty. We test these arguments using a survey experiment that systematically manipulates cognitive signals (scientific competence and factual justification) and affective signals (emotional tone in communication) in messages attributed to a non-majoritarian public institution. The experimental design allows us to identify the independent and interactive effects of affective and cognitive cues on citizens’ perceptions of institutional legitimacy. Across experimental conditions, we show that affective signaling significantly enhances legitimacy perceptions and amplifies the effects of competence-based communication, especially when institutional authority is contested. By integrating affective governance perspectives with theories of bureaucratic legitimacy and responsiveness, this study reconceptualizes public legitimacy as an affective–cognitive judgment process and demonstrates the central role of emotional communication in sustaining democratic authority in contemporary regulatory governance.