WVS Webinar on April 25: The Elite-Citizen Gap in International Organization Legitimacy
Welcome to the World Values Survey Association's webinar series. In these monthly sessions, we invite scholars from various disciplines who utilize WVS survey data, either alone or in combination with other datasets, to share their latest findings and insights. The webinars will explore a wide range of topics measured through the time-series WVS surveys, covering analysis of both substantive issues and methodological perspectives. Learn more about the forthcoming webinars here.
In this webinar, our guest speakers, Jan Aart Scholte from Leiden University and Soetkin Verhaegen from Maastricht University, explored the elite-citizen gap in confidence toward international organizations using data from the World Values Survey and a parallel elite survey. Their analysis across five countries shows that elites express significantly higher confidence than the general public, with individual-level factors such as socioeconomic status, political values, and institutional trust helping to explain this gap. The presentation offers insights into how legitimacy is perceived differently across societal groups and what this means for the future of global governance.
This presentation describes and explains a striking difference in average confidence held vis-a-vis international organizations by elites on the one hand and general publics on the other. Our evidence for citizen opinion is drawn from the World Values Survey. Our evidence for elite opinion is drawn from parallel questions in a concurrently fielded elite survey. Across five countries and six international organizations we find that elites on average hold some 30 per cent greater confidence than citizens at large. To explain this gap, we look in particular at a range of individual-level factors related to socioeconomic status, political values, geographical identification and domestic institutional trust - and discover a number of significant associations in all four areas.
Jan Aart Scholte is Professor of Global Transformations and Governance Challenges at Leiden University. Research interests cover various aspects of governing a global world, including polycentrism, multistakeholder institutions, and both empirical and normative legitimacy.
Soetkin Verhaegen is Assistant Professor of European Politics at Maastricht University. Her research inquires questions about how citizens relate to governing institutions at the local, regional, national, European and global level. Specifically, she is interested in (il)legitimacy beliefs. Focussing on attitudes about regional and international government and institutions, her work is situated at the crossroads of political sociology, comparative politics and international relations. Currently, Soetkin is co-PI of the GLOBPOL project (with Virginie Van Ingelgom) on globalization, politics and multilevel legitimacy, and part of the ENSURED Horizon consortium that studies transformations of global governance.
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