Elite Framing and the Legitimacy of Global Governance

Abstract

Globalization has created opportunities and pressures that require cooperation beyond the nation-state. As a consequence, national governments worldwide are delegating governance tasks to international organizations. These organizations are now vital actors in efforts to address global challenges and overcome collective action problems, but public opposition has the power to severely curb their effectiveness. Yet to date, we know very little about public support for those global governance organizations that have not been heavily politicized in the public domain. This raises the important question of why some organizations involved in global governance become politicized and contested by the public, whereas others do not? And what shapes people's initial attitudes about such complex organizations?

This dissertation develops a broad theory for when global governance organizations become politicized and, in the process, perceived as illegitimate by the public. Across three substantive chapters, comprising six original experiments, I first examine support for global private governance in general, then in the context of environmental standard-setting, and finally I expand the scope to examine support for global governance more broadly. In contrast to explanations based on people's sincere preferences about what type of governance is legitimate, I argue that politicization is largely a function of elite messages that contain affective cues about an organization's legitimacy. I show that information about non-governmental governance that is beyond the control of democratic nation-states does not, by itself, depress support. Rather, it takes elite rhetoric affectively tagging these institutions as illegitimate to bring about this attitude change. Moreover, in seeking to elucidate these processes, I also develop a novel way of conceptualizing and measuring framing effects. Here, I examine how exposure to frames about organizations that people know very little about has the power to not only shape attitudes but change how people make sense of these organizations in the first place.