Citizens’ legitimacy judgements on multi-stakeholder governance model: The spillover effects of corporate political activity and social trust

Citizens’ legimitation of multi-stakeholder governance models is an important topic of research in the literature focused on the relationship between industry and society, in particular in those contexts in which corporations adopt a political role and social trust is an outstanding construct.

Abstract:

Recent years have witnessed increasing corporate participation in multi-stakeholder governance models to decide on social issues. Insufficient academic attention has been paid to how citizens legitimise this alternative, which has no democratic endorsement. Citizens do not know enough about these governance models and use heuristics, which produce spillover effects, to form legitimacy judgements about them.
The study focuses on residents living near an industrial complex with environmental risks. The results corroborate the spillover from social trust but not from perceptions of the CPA tactics deployed by the firms in the complex. However, these perceptions are indirectly related
to citizens’ legitimacy through social trust.

The main topics of the manuscript:

Social trust influences citizens’ legitimacy judgements on multi-stakeholder governance models

Link to the paper on the digital journal: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2024.04.004