Stockholm university

Research project Geographies of discontent

How regional inequalities affect the perceived legitimacy of international organizations

Individuals worldwide are divided over the legitimacy of international organizations, such as the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Legitimacy is the judgment that political authority is proper and appropriately exercised. Being legitimate is important to the success of international organizations since it facilitates securing the support, resources, and compliance necessary to solve critical transboundary challenges. This project examines the sources of individual legitimacy perceptions of international organizations by focusing on a surprisingly understudied factor: regional inequalities. 

Inequalities between subnational regions have been shown to make anti-system voting more likely in socioeconomically ‘left behind’ places. This project argues that regional inequalities may also affect citizens' deep-seated legitimacy beliefs towards international organizations. Empirically, the project examines novel subnational-level data from 60 countries over 32 years on legitimacy beliefs, socioeconomic factors, and external shocks. The project also conducts survey experiments to study regional inequality effects on legitimacy at the individual level.  

The project also generates a large-scale database containing sub-national-level indicators for social and political trust in domestic, regional and international institutions. The database, SUB-TRUST, will contain cross-national survey data from the world’s largest cross-national surveys for 180 countries from 1990-2022. The indicators include, for instance, trust in domestic government, in the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and a large number of other institutions. SUB-TRUST will be published early in 2025 and can be linked to other subnational data, for example from the UCDP/PRIO conflict dataset, from the macro-political and economic datasets of the FAO and the World Bank, as well as to various subnational measures of environmental and climatic hazard and disasters.

Citizens

Project members

Project managers

Lisa Dellmuth

Professor

Department of Economic History and International Relations
Lisa Dellmuth

Members

Lisa Dellmuth

Professor

Department of Economic History and International Relations
Lisa Dellmuth

Publications

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