Cosmopolitan identity, authority, and domestic support of international organizations

Abstract

What effect does the institutional design of international organizations (IOs) have on their domestic support? In this article, we focus on interactions between citizens’ social identity and institutional characteristics that may have the potential to polarize citizens’ IO attitudes. We argue that citizens’ cosmopolitan identity makes them react in diametrically opposed ways to IO settings on the authority dimension. Transferring more authority to an IO may make citizens with higher levels of cosmopolitan identity more supportive of the IO, while citizens with lower levels of cosmopolitan identity should become even more skeptical. We test our expectations by conducting a factorial survey experiment in six different countries. The empirical results support our argument. As cosmopolitan identity is strongly connected to the newly evolving domestic cleavage regarding international cooperation and global governance, reforms to IO authority settings thus have the potential to further increase the polarization of domestic attitudes toward IOs.