What Global Governance Do the People Want? A Multi-Country Survey Experiment on Institutional Designs for the United Nations

Some scholars identify a general trend towards increasing salience and contestation of international governance among the public of various countries (Zürn 2018). But what determines public support or opposition to global governance institutions? Recent survey-based research has investigated public attitudes on the United Nations in various countries (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2015; Ecker-Ehrhardt 2014; Johnson 2011; Norris 2000; Torgler 2008). While insightful in many ways, these studies have some limitations. First, they can only provide limited information on which specific aspects of the UN cause high or low support. Second, they mostly capture views on the UN as it is and not also on how it could be after substantial reforms. Thus, they provide little guidance to scholars, activists and policy-makers interested in how the UN and other IOs could be reformed to improve – or at least maintain – public support for them around the world. In particular, no existing study examines how views on some design features of the UN, such as an ability to take decisions that are binding also for states that have voted against them, relate to views on other design features, such as the type and extent of democratic control mechanisms present in the organization. Our paper reports the findings of a survey experiment conducted on representative samples of the general population in six countries: Argentina, China, India, Russia, Spain and the United States. The conjoint design allows us to estimate public preferences for various institutional design features and various ways in which they can be combined. Specifically, we estimate preferences on the bindingness of UN decisions; the enforcement of UN decisions; how the UN can obtain resources; main decision-making bodies; the participation of directly elected representatives in UN decision-making; the distribution of votes among countries; special veto rights; and special rights for democratic countries.