The Behavioral Implications of Legitimacy: An Experimental Approach

Legitimacy is assumed to have behavioral implications and to constitute an important antecedent of institutional stability and institutional change. Most research, however, focused on the perceptual component of legitimacy or studied intentions to act towards legitimacy objects through hypothetical experiments. To advance the understanding of the behavioral implications of legitimacy, we conducted three experiments to examine the effects of normative and instrumental concerns on support for a legitimacy object. Moreover, we compare the effects of normative and instrumental concerns on behavior with the effects of both concerns on two types of individual-level legitimacy judgments: propriety and validity beliefs. We found that normative concerns affect propriety beliefs and the degree of support for legitimacy objects. By contrast, instrumental concerns significantly influence the degree of support for legitimacy objects, but they seem to have no impact on propriety and validity beliefs. Importantly, eliciting individuals’ propriety and validity beliefs reduced the influence of instrumental concerns on their support for a legitimacy object. Our findings demonstrate that the relationship between legitimacy judgments and behavior is more complex than commonly assumed and suggests that it is essential to include behavioral measures in experimental research on legitimacy.