The legitimacy of international organizations seems more contested than ever today. Recent debates on the politicization of international organizations illustrate that IOs have increasingly become subject to critical public review. While the legitimacy of international governance has long been treated as a non-issue, IOs such as the EU or the G8 are now suffering a legitimacy crisis. This panel will explore how IOs attempt to deal with these legitimacy challenges. Unlike much extant empirical work on legitimacy (public opinion research, voting and protest research), which assumes a bottom-up perspective, the panel focuses on top-down processes of legitimation, i.e., the ‘production’ of legitimacy by political elites. These elites go to great lengths to establish or maintain legitimacy. Understanding the self-legitimating practices of political elites is crucial, since they play a key role in establishing the authority of political orders. This panel will contribute to a more thorough understanding of the empirical legitimacy of IOs by focusing on the following questions: How do IOs respond to their alleged legitimacy crisis? How do IOs or their representatives legitimate themselves, their goals, principles and procedures? What strategies do they employ in order to generate legitimacy? How do they interact with their environment (i.e. NGOs, civil society actors etc.) in order to gain political support? The panel welcomes papers which deal theoretically with legitimation practices of IOs, provide methodological insights into the analysis of legitimation practices, or present empirical findings on the attempts of IOs to generate legitimacy.
The panel is chaired by Martin Nonhoff (University of Bremen) and Jennifer Gronau (University of Bremen). It is part of Section 82 " Developments of and in International Organisations - From Interstate to Global Order?". According to ECPR rules, paper proposals must be submitted through the MyECPR system (https://www.ecprnet.eu/myecpr/login.asp <https://www.ecprnet.eu/myecpr/login.asp> ).
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding the panel:
mnonhoff [at] zes.uni-bremen.de
jennifer.gronau [at] sfb597.uni-bremen.de