Why do they want the UN to decide? A two-step model of public support for UN authority

Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt

No 171, TranState Working Papers from University of Bremen, Collaborative Research Center 597: Transformations of the State

Abstract: Why do citizens support or reject the idea of global authority? The paper addresses this question by examining individual attitudes about UN authority in a comparative perspective. According to the main argument put forward in this paper, we may think of the formation of citizens' support for international authority as a two-step process. First, the paper theorizes the formation of global attitudes about the UN according to a process of cognitive mobilization. Using data from the fifth wave of the World Values Survey (2005-2007), I find strong empirical support for the role of individual attention to public cues for the relevance of the UN in rising global awareness of UN authority. In the second step, the paper examines how cognitively mobilized citizens use available information to make up their minds about UN authority. The analysis shows that global public support for UN authority largely depends on a cosmopolitan understanding of global interdependence and moral universalism. However, the analysis of contextual variables also suggests that a particularist calculus of national costs and benefits explains citizens' support for (and rejection of) UN authority to a remarkable extent.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/76800/1/75140425X.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:sfb597:171

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in TranState Working Papers from University of Bremen, Collaborative Research Center 597: Transformations of the State Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().