While most accounts see worshippers of Saturn as indigenous Africans or rural peasants, this chapter argues that stele-dedicants used stelae to articulate positions for themselves within the frameworks of the wider empire. Unlike earlier stelae, which worked to imagine stele-dedicants as a horizontal community of equals, stelae dedicated from the first century BCE onward became billboards that asserted the prestige of dedicants in the deeply localized but also vertically structured world of the Roman Empire. This can be seen in the adoption of new anthropocentric iconographies that adapt a koine of imagery, the composition of stelae, and new titles for worshippers like sacerdos that are borrowed from a civic sphere.

While it is common to speak of the crisis of democracy, we prefer to speak of the multiplicity of diabolical challenges that democracy now confronts. Challenges are diabolical when they have multiple dimensions and are potentially catastrophic, subtle, and interconnected. But crucially, there are clever operators who have figured out how to prosper in this environment. The challenges include a problematic political soundscape, right-wing populism, extremism, denial, and authoritarianism, all of which are the subjects of subsequent chapters. We sketch the beginnings of a deliberative response to these challenges, which puts citizens at the center, while recognizing the importance of attending to elites. A deliberative constraint can restrict what elite operators can do. We set out the essential elements of deliberative democracy and how we understand its practice, especially in deliberative systems and the public sphere.

Although equality lies at the heart of his political theory, Rousseau also argues that physical and natural inequalities are inescapable and significant. How can people who are naturally unequal become political equals? This chapter considers three possible mechanisms by which political equality could “substitute” for inequality – through education, by convention, and via deliberate opacity – and supports the third. Drawing on the account of a range property made famous by John Rawls, the opacity mechanism enables political equality among those with sufficient judgment to serve as citizens (relegating others to the status of subjects) but does not peer closely into disparities among them. However, unlike other social-contract accounts, the justification for opacity in Rousseau’s thought rests on his distinctive concern for the destructive potential of amour-propre.

This chapter documents Old Comedy’s presentation of alcoholic consumption, both in a sympotic context and elsewhere, and to bring out how different was the perception of the consumption of wine by discerning citizens in a symposium, mixed with water and in moderation, from that by women or slaves, typically indiscriminately, neat and to excess

Climate change and other global processes shape and are shaped by local process such as land use change. Does the idea of sustainability help us take account of both human well-being and the environment at the local and global level? To answer, we have to unpack what is involved in decision-making and what sustainability means. Decisions are made in multiple roles: consumer, citizen, role model for others, organizational participant, investor, and resource manager. In all of these roles, context, including inequalities, shapes opportunities and constraints and thus decisions. Context often reflects a long history of previous decisions, including discrimination. Thus context and choice are two views of the same process.

Why do ordinary citizens believe in an autocratic ideology? Why do people follow their autocratic leader? How can autocrats win the hearts and minds of their people, securing their support? This chapter seeks to absorb the manifold responses that have been given to these questions in the last decades. It theorizes the role of ordinary citizens in autocratic regimes, illuminating the legitimacy claims of autocratic rulers on the one hand and the popular beliefs in these legitimacy claims on the other hand. Drawing on a rich repository of previous research, it highlights the two strategies of autocracies to deal with their people. Autocracies might either overwhelm their citizens through mass-level political indoctrination or systematically underwhelm them, keeping them satisfied and apolitical. While the former relies on ideational legitimation, the latter refers to socioeconomic performance and a managerial, technocratic style of rule. Both strategies share the goal of thwarting the risk of public protest.

This chapter summarizes the empirical findings of the book and outlines its broader implications for our understanding of politics. It reviews evidence in the book showing that elite communication affects the way citizens perceive of the legitimacy of IOs. When elites endorse or criticize international organizations in public, citizens take notice and adjust their opinions. In addition, it concludes that elites are more likely to shape citizen opinion toward international organizations under some conditions than others. Key moderating factors pertain to all three key components of the communicative context: elites, messages, and citizens. The chapter then discusses the broader implications of the book for current debates in four areas: legitimacy and legitimation, drivers of public opinion, elite influence and democracy, and the contemporary backlash against global governance.

This chapter explores the conditions under which global elites are influential in shaping citizens’ legitimacy beliefs toward global governance. It distinguishes between member governments, non-governmental organizations, and international organizations as three sets of global elites, evaluates whether these elites impact legitimacy beliefs through their communication, and identifies the conditions under which such communication is more successful. The chapter examines theoretical expectations comparatively across five prominent global or regional international organizations, including the European Union, International Monetary Fund, and United Nations. At the heart of the empirical investigation is a survey-embedded experiment in three countries (Germany, the UK, and the US). The analysis shows that communication by more credible elites (member governments and NGOs) has stronger effects on citizens’ legitimacy perceptions than communication by less credible elites (international organizations themselves).

This chapter presents the books theory of elite communication effects on public opinion in global governance. It begins by defining legitimacy beliefs and introducing its favored empirical measure of such beliefs. In developing the book’s theory, the chapter starts from what is distinctive about the global setting in which elites and their messages may impact public opinion. The core of the argument is presented in two steps. The first step explains why elite communication can be expected to shape citizens’ legitimacy beliefs, given that citizens rely on cognitive heuristics when forming opinions. The second step specifies when elite communication can be expected to be particularly influential, identifying conditions associated with all three components of the communicative setting – elites, messages, and citizens.

This chapter focuses on domestic elites and examines the conditions under which political parties influence public perceptions of international organization legitimacy. While it is well-known that political parties are powerful communicators about domestic political matters, less is known about the effects of party cues on global political issues. The chapter explores this topic based on two survey experiments on party communication regarding two international organizations (North Atlantic Treaty Organization and United Nations). The experiments are embedded in surveys conducted in two countries (Germany and the US), which vary in the degree of political polarization. The chapter finds that party cues tend to shape legitimacy beliefs toward NATO and the UN in the highly polarized US setting, while few effects are detected in the less polarized German context.

This chapter sets the stage for the book by providing an empirical overview of citizen legitimacy beliefs, elite legitimacy beliefs, and elite communication in global governance. It shows that citizen legitimacy beliefs vary across countries, international organizations, and over time, but that there is no secular decline in international organization legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. It further demonstrates that elites are divided in their legitimacy beliefs, but that they on average moderately support international organizations. Elite communication in global governance tends to be negative in tone in the context of the international organizations studied, but also involves a broadening of narratives about international organizations and a pattern of fluctuations over time.

This chapter outlines the key paradox motiving the book: while world politics features growing elite contestation over international organizations, we know little about the effects of such communication on citizens legitimacy beliefs toward global governance. The chapter explains the theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions of the book, and outlines its core argument and findings in brief. It motivates the survey-experimental and comparative research design developed to study elite communication effects on legitimacy beliefs in this book. By providing a review of previous research on legitimacy, legitimation, public opinion, and elite influence, this introductory chapter relates to some of the most important debates in contemporary international relations research.

This chapter examines whether and to what extent information about the procedures and performances of international organizations affects citizens legitimacy beliefs. It examines this issue comparatively across seven international organizations in different issue areas, including the African Union, European Union, United Nations Security Council, and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The survey is conducted in four countries in diverse world regions (Germany, the Philippines, South Africa, and the US). The analysis shows that information about both procedures and performances impact legitimacy beliefs. Moreover, citizens update their legitimacy beliefs in line with information about democracy, effectiveness, and fairness in global governance.

This chapter examines how information on the authority and purpose of international organizations influences citizen legitimacy beliefs toward global governance. Advancing on previous research that primarily has studied effects of procedures and performances on citizens legitimacy beliefs, this chapter uses a conjoint experimental design to assess how different institutional qualities matter when simultaneously communicated to citizens. The chapter explores this issue across hypothetical international organizations in two countries (Germany and the US). It finds that citizens form legitimacy beliefs in line with information about authority and purpose in international organizations. However, this relationship depends on citizens’ political priors. Information about an international organization’s authority has a weaker negative effect on legitimacy beliefs among internationalist citizens. Moreover, the effect of information about an international organization’s social purpose depends on citizens’ political values. These conditioning effects are only found in the more polarized context of the US and not in Germany.

How does a group of strangers, many of whom are initially unhappy about serving as jurors, become a jury that works together as a group to reach a unanimous verdict based on the evidence that was presented to them during the trial and who leave their experience satisfied with the job they have done and with the jury system? The answer lies in the jury process and the way in which it transforms citizens into jurors. The various stages of the jury process, including the summons, voir dire, instructions, and deliberations, help citizens to step into their role as jurors. The final stage, the post-verdict interview with the judge, helps jurors to leave their role as jurors behind and to resume their lives as private citizens who will serve as emissaries for the jury. Although the jury process carries out this transformation of citizens into jurors reasonably well, there is still room for improvement. Each of the stages of the jury process can be improved upon by looking at the process as a whole rather than each stage in isolation, and by ensuring that any reforms further the transformation of citizens into jurors.

This chapter advances a theory of the citizen-consumer that connects the quality of basic services to trust in government, trust in government to consumer behavior, consumer behavior to citizen political participation, and citizen political participation back to the quality of basic services. When basic services are sound, citizens trust the institutions of government; when basic services fail, citizens distrust those same institutions. People who trust government rely on public services, whereas those who distrust government opt instead for more expensive commercial alternatives. This distrust premium is pure profit to government’s commercial competitors and is paid disproportionately by the politically marginalized. Consumers who use public services have a strong interest in safeguarding quality, so they are politically active citizens, demanding high-quality public services. Consumers who abandon public services in favor of commercial firms withdraw from political life. These distrustful, disengaged citizens demand little from government and oppose public investments. Starved of resources and attention, governments’ service quality declines and a vicious cycle of distrust ensues.