Expanding or defending legitimacy? Why international organizations intensify self-legitimation
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In: Review of International Organizations, Vol. 19, No. 4, 10.2024, p. 753-784.
Research output: Journal contributions › Journal articles › Research › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Expanding or defending legitimacy? Why international organizations intensify self-legitimation
AU - Schmidtke, Henning
AU - Lenz, Tobias
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s). Special Issue: Life Cycles of International Cooperation
PY - 2024/10
Y1 - 2024/10
N2 - Recent decades have seen an intensification of international organizations’ (IOs) attempts to justify their authority. The existing research suggests that IO representatives have scaled up self-legitimation to defend their organizations’ legitimacy in light of public criticism. In contrast, this article demonstrates that IOs intensify self-legitimation to mobilize additional support from relevant audiences when their authority increases. We argue that self-legitimation aims primarily to achieve proactive legitimacy expansion instead of reactive legitimacy protection. We develop this argument in three steps. First, we draw on organizational sociology and management studies to theorize the connection between self-legitimation and an organization’s life stages. Second, we introduce a novel dataset on the self-legitimation of 28 regional IOs between 1980 and 2019 and show that the intensity of self-legitimation evolves in phases. Third, we provide a multivariate statistical analysis and a brief vignette on the African Union, both of which indicate that IOs that shift from unanimity or consensus to majority voting tend to intensify self-legitimation.
AB - Recent decades have seen an intensification of international organizations’ (IOs) attempts to justify their authority. The existing research suggests that IO representatives have scaled up self-legitimation to defend their organizations’ legitimacy in light of public criticism. In contrast, this article demonstrates that IOs intensify self-legitimation to mobilize additional support from relevant audiences when their authority increases. We argue that self-legitimation aims primarily to achieve proactive legitimacy expansion instead of reactive legitimacy protection. We develop this argument in three steps. First, we draw on organizational sociology and management studies to theorize the connection between self-legitimation and an organization’s life stages. Second, we introduce a novel dataset on the self-legitimation of 28 regional IOs between 1980 and 2019 and show that the intensity of self-legitimation evolves in phases. Third, we provide a multivariate statistical analysis and a brief vignette on the African Union, both of which indicate that IOs that shift from unanimity or consensus to majority voting tend to intensify self-legitimation.
KW - Discourse
KW - International organizations
KW - Justification
KW - Legitimation
KW - Life stages
KW - Regional cooperation
KW - Politics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85165600427&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/f49d4c27-9aec-3d93-90af-642ae2e5285e/
U2 - 10.1007/s11558-023-09498-0
DO - 10.1007/s11558-023-09498-0
M3 - Journal articles
AN - SCOPUS:85165600427
VL - 19
SP - 753
EP - 784
JO - Review of International Organizations
JF - Review of International Organizations
SN - 1559-7431
IS - 4
ER -