Global Legitimacy Crises Decline and Revival in Multilateral Governance

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Global Legitimacy Crises addresses the consequences of legitimacy in global governance, in particular asking: when and how do legitimacy crises affect international organizations (IOs) and their capacity to rule. The book starts with a new conceptualization of legitimacy crisis that looks at public
challenges from a variety of actors. Based on this conceptualization, it applies a mixed-methods approach to identify and examine legitimacy crises, starting with a quantitative analysis of mass media data on challenges of a sample of 32 IOs. It shows that some, but not all organizations have
experienced legitimacy crises, spread over several decades from 1985 to 2020. Following this, the book presents a qualitative study to further examine legitimacy crises of two selected case studies: the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC). Whereas earlier research assumed that legitimacy crises have negative consequences, the book introduces a theoretical framework that privileges the activation inherent in a legitimacy crisis. It holds that this activation may not only harm an IO, but could also strengthen it, in terms of
its material, institutional, and decision-making capacity. The following statistical analysis shows that whether a crisis has predominantly negative or positive effects depends on a variety of factors. These include the specific audience whose challenges define a certain crisis, and several
institutional properties of the targeted organization. The ensuing in-depth analysis of the WTO and the UNFCCC further reveals how legitimacy crises and both positive and negative consequences are interlinked, and that effects of crises are sometimes even visible beyond the organizational borders.

Thomas Sommerer, Professor of Political Science, University of Potsdam,Hans Agné, Professor of Political Science, Stockholm University,Fariborz Zelli, Associate Professor, Lund University,Bart Bes, Postdoctoral Fellow, Lund University

Thomas Sommerer is Professor of Political Science with a specialization in international organizations at the University of Potsdam. Previously, he was Associate Professor at Stockholm University and worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz (Dr. rer soc. in 2009), the University of
Hamburg, and the Max Planck Institute in Bonn. His research is focused on the design and performance of international organizations, democracy, and legitimacy in global governance, and transnational processes of diffusion and learning

Hans Agné is Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University since 2020. He defended his PhD in 2004 and was tenured in 2012 at Stockholm university. He has been visiting scholar at Leeds University, at Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin, at London School of economics and political science, at
Catania University, and at Oxford University. His research interests revolve around legitimacy and democracy political theory, international relations, and comparative politics.


Fariborz Zelli is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Lund University. Prior to joining Lund University in 2012, he worked as a Post-doctoral Fellow at the German Development Institute (2009-2011) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (2006-2009) and as a
Research Assistant at the Center for International Relations at Tübingen University (2001-2003). His major research interests include global environmental governance (in particular regarding climate change, biodiversity and forestry), institutional complexity, and environmental peacebuilding.


Bart Joachim Bes is a political scientist who studies the impact of public and political opposition on governmental institutions, particularly the attitudinal and behavioral responses of policy-makers. He completed his Ph.D. at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he investigated the impact of
politicization on EU Commission officials' institutional role conceptions (2012 - 2017). Hereafter, he became a postdoctoral fellow in the Legitimacy in Global Governance (LegGov) program at Lund University.

1. Introduction: Global Legitimacy Crises Revisited
PART I: Legitimacy Crises in Multilateral Governance
2. Conceptualizing Legitimacy Crises in Multilateral Governance
3. Patterns of Legitimacy Crises in 32 International Organizations
4. The Legitimacy Crises of the WTO and the UNFCCC
PART II: The Consequences of Legitimacy Crises in Multilateral Governance
5. Explaining the Consequences of Legitimacy Crises in Multilateral Governance: A Theoretical Framework
6. The Consequences of IO Legitimacy Crises: A Quantitative Approach
7. The Consequences of Legitimacy Crises in Global Governance: A Qualitative Assessment
8. Conclusion: The Scope and Effects of Global Legitimacy Crises