Comparing and explaining legitimacy beliefs towards political institutions in a multilevel context

Contemporary European societies are governed by institutions and actors on various government levels, taking the shape of an integrated structure of multilevel governance. Whether citizens perceive these governing political institutions as legitimate is a key question. Indeed, although legitimacy is far from being a new concept (e.g. Weber, 1968), it has attracted renewed attention over the course of the last two decades, in particular in a context marked by the development of multilevel governance. Yet, studies typically focus on institutions on only one or two levels. Hence, scholarship still lacks a comprehensive understanding of the concept of legitimacy in a multilevel context, as well as an integrated empirical approach to investigate the interaction between legitimacy beliefs in this multilevel context. The absence of a deep understanding of the relationship between citizens’ beliefs about the various governance levels they are subject to is problematic, as the multilevel setting has a profound impact on legitimation dynamics. Our paper aims to fill these conceptual and empirical gaps. We ask to what extent citizens perceive political institutions at the subnational, national, regional (i.c. the EU) and global level of governance as legitimate, on what normative grounds their legitimacy beliefs are constructed and how they relate to each other? Moreover, we ask how variation in citizens’ perceptions of legitimacy in this multilevel context be explained. To do so, we have fielded an original cross-national survey in eight European countries which vary in the extent to which multilevel governance has developed and is contested. In this survey, we included original questions to measure perceptions of legitimacy in a multilevel context both in terms of normative justifiability – in citizens’ own terms – and in terms of consent. These questions were developed (and pre-tested) to improve formerly used operationalizations of legitimacy (e.g. trust and support), assessing the strengths and limitations of these operationalizations against our conceptualization of legitimacy beliefs. Our cross-national survey thus enables us to study how legitimacy beliefs towards different institutions on different levels relate to each other, not only in terms of evaluation but also regarding their normative contents. Moreover, the survey is set up to allow us to investigate explanations for variation in legitimacy perceptions across levels. We test hypotheses regarding the national-institutional context, as well as individuals’ identification, utilitarian considerations, political attitudes and experiences. The study contributes to our understanding of how citizens view politics as it is organized today, dispersed across governance levels.