What is it about?
According to political science, modern societies can separate the state function and the politicians’ mission. However, the existing relationship between political disaffection and state legitimacy indicates the contrary. The interest held by the European Union inhabitants in their politicians has been decreasing, and the closeness to a specific political party or political leader has been weakening. Many European countries have a great degree of polarity in their political parties’ system, which augments the complexity of forming governments or even makes it impossible. Citizens have been affected by corruption, the economic situation, migratory crisis, or the European project weakness. They feel that politicians have forgotten their role as the people’s representatives and their responsibility to behave according to society’s general interest. Through its institutions, the state must ensure the country’s performance and maintain it despite the change in the political leaders. Moreover, its legitimacy will depend on the level of social support received by these institutions. This research aims to quantify if the current political disaffection influences the European Union states’ social support level or state legitimacy. It also expects to demonstrate which sociodemographic and psychographic variables influence on governments’ fragility and the dilution of state legitimacy, which is critical for countries’ stability. For this purpose, we used the available data from the European Social Survey for 2016, and we developed a statistical analysis through variation and regression analysis. The results highlight the strong effect that political disaffection, as well as variables such as religion, immigration perception, citizenship, or emotional state have on state legitimacy and reveal the need for changes in the political parties’ performance and behavior to maintain the countries’ stability.
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Why is it important?
State legitimacy is the foundation of democracy, but Europe faces an unprecedented crisis of trust. This study is pioneering in empirically quantifying how political disaffection, combined with sociodemographic variables (age, education, employment) and psychographic variables (values, attitudes), determines state legitimacy in the European Union. Using advanced structural equation modeling methodology, the authors demonstrate that political disaffection is a critical predictor of state delegitimation, affecting specific social groups differently (the unemployed, people with lower education), and that psychographic characteristics capture dimensions that traditional demographic analysis misses. In a context of rising Eurosceptic populism and threats to democracy, these findings offer an evidence-based roadmap for European governments and institutions to rebuild institutional trust through segmented policies that simultaneously address political disaffection and the specific needs of different citizen groups. The study establishes a replicable model for measuring state legitimacy that is both theoretically advanced and practically actionable for policymakers facing the deepest crisis of democratic legitimation in recent decades.
Perspectives
This study opens an urgent horizon of multidimensional research on democratic legitimacy in Europe. What are the specific causal mechanisms through which disaffection erodes legitimacy in different national contexts, and how do local, regional, and European identities interact in its construction, especially in contexts of extreme economic inequality? What role do emerging factors such as digital polarization, disinformation, and social media play in accelerating delegitimation cycles, and can specific public interventions—deliberative citizen participation, strategic institutional communication, democratic process reform—reverse disaffection among particularly vulnerable groups? For policymakers: how can we design policies that simultaneously strengthen institutional trust, reduce socioeconomic inequalities, and expand spaces for genuine participation, and what is the role of civic education, transparency, and accountability in rebuilding legitimacy? For civil society: how can spaces for citizen deliberation and social change movements become catalysts for new, more inclusive democratic legitimacy, and what does it mean to rebuild a European social contract that satisfies the citizenship aspirations of increasingly diverse populations? Ultimately, this work illuminates a critical problem but opens spaces for questioning, innovation, and collective action, inviting researchers, policymakers, and citizens to actively participate in answering the most important question: What kind of democracy and legitimacy do we want to build together for the coming decades in Europe?
Iria Paz Gil
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Political Disaffection, Sociodemographic, and Psychographic Variables as State Legitimacy Determinants in the European Union, American Behavioral Scientist, December 2020, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0002764220981116.
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