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

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. Based on institutional and sensemaking theories and with insights from the social psychology literature, we provide empirical evidence for the possible spillover effects derived from a similarity-based heuristic, from citizens’ perceptions of corporate political activity (CPA) tactics, and from a trust heuristic, represented by social trust.

The study focuses on residents living near an industrial complex with environmental risks. The results were obtained using structural equation models and 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. We present some theoretical and practical implications of citizens’ legitimacy of multi-stakeholder governance models.