How does the age makeup of democratic institutions affect public evaluations of their legitimacy? This paper tests whether incorporating younger representatives into a bipartisan state legislative committee changes citizens’ views of procedure, trust and decisions. Using experimental variation and observational comparisons, the authors link age composition to shifts in perceived fairness and trust while assessing who responds most to youth representation.
This research maps how public confidence in the Supreme Court has changed and why those changes now split sharply along partisan lines. The analysis proceeds in three steps to show both the scope and the mechanisms behind declining legitimacy.
Where formal state authority is limited, local leaders often drive political mobilization — but why are some leaders more effective than others? This study introduces the concept of encompassing authority: how widely individuals perceive a leader as influencing multiple domains of their lives. Using original survey data from Zambia’s 2021 elections, the authors compare religious leaders, chiefs, and local councillors and test whether encompassing authority predicts mobilization beyond leader traits and voter characteristics.
This paper asks why autocrats commonly publicize redistributive policies and argues that such messaging helps sustain a façade of democracy. The authors' core claim is that many citizens understand democracy in terms of social equity rather than solely procedural rules; by highlighting equity-promoting policies, regimes can manipulate perceptions of how democratic they are. To evaluate this account, the study first analyzes extensive cross-national survey data to show that perceived social equity strongly predicts perceived democratic legitimacy. It then uses a preregistered survey experiment that exposes respondents in China to real-world redistributionist propaganda and finds that those exposed evaluated China’s democracy more positively. The authors present these findings as consistent with the argument that redistributionist propaganda can bolster apparent democratic legitimacy, while the abstract preserves the study's qualifications and avoids broader causal or generalizing claims beyond the reported analyses.
Does state repression itself — even without deliberate information manipulation — change public attitudes so that citizens come to endorse the punished behaviors' condemnation and support further repression? The paper introduces the "authoritarian cue effect," where citizens interpret acts of repression as signals of the regime's disapproval and update their beliefs and attitudes accordingly.
This paper asks whether the U.S. Electoral College (EC) produces unusually close, disputable presidential outcomes and reports a quantitative assessment using existing empirical election models. The authors apply novel combinations of empirical election models drawn from several sources to estimate the probability of “close” outcomes and to compare those probabilities under the EC versus plausible popular‑vote alternatives. Their central contribution is an explicit claim—based on these model applications—that the EC both generates and increases the likelihood of razor‑thin margins.
The authors ask whether distinct state actions—learning demands, compliance demands, and sanctions—affect how citizens perceive welfare policy, beneficiaries, and the administering agency. Using a factorial survey experiment framed around German unemployment benefits, the study aims to distinguish which kinds of administrative burdens produce shifts in policy support, spending expectations, and legitimacy judgments. The piece contributes by unpacking heterogeneous policy-feedback effects across conceptually different state actions rather than treating administrative burden as a single phenomenon.
This article delivers the first systematic, comparative look at how elites and citizens view the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Legitimacy beliefs were measured for six key IOs across five countries: Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, and the United States. The study compares public opinion and multiple elite groups to assess where and how perceptions diverge.
Participatory processes are often seen as potential solutions for democratic legitimacy deficits. However, how we evaluate these initiatives remains contentious.
This article asks how votes in sovereignty referendums translate into policy preferences about future outcomes and influence perceptions of legitimacy, using the 2016 British EU membership referendum as a case. The authors contribute by measuring how different possible Brexit negotiation outcomes were evaluated by the public and whether the referendum result provided clear guidance about what voters would prefer and regard as legitimate.
Why did some Bolivian departments manage COVID-19 more successfully than others? This study argues that low government legitimacy undermines coordinated responses to national crises—especially where political polarization politicizes the response. Low legitimacy also magnifies existing challenges such as poverty and weak infrastructure, making effective implementation and compliance more difficult.
Scholars debate whether public awareness improves governance in liberal democracies. This article explores its impact on constitutional review by unpopular courts.
The rise of anti-Islam rhetoric in post-2015 France raises crucial questions about the far right. Does it rely on old-fashioned racism, inviting pushback? Or does it use a more sophisticated approach to blend with national values and gain political traction?
Does legitimacy drive international institutional change? This article examines three causal mechanisms by which variation in legitimacy induces regional parliamentarization. Using survival analysis on a novel dataset of thirty-six regional organizations from 1950-2010, the authors find empowerment of supranational secretariats, proximity to the European Union, and neighborhood parliamentarization increase adoption rates. These results reveal that legitimacy judgments stem from cognitive referents—a previously overlooked source of institutional change.