Affecting State Legitimacy From Abroad: The Effects of Travel Policies on Citizens' Willingness to Obey Their State
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Milosav, Đorđe, Affecting State Legitimacy From Abroad: The Effects of Travel Policies on Citizens' Willingness to Obey Their State, Trinity College Dublin, School of Social Sciences & Philosophy, Political Science, 2024Download Item:
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Abstract:
This dissertation aims to examine the effects of restrictive travel policies implemented by foreign countries on citizens' evaluations of state legitimacy in electoral autocracies. This question matters because restrictive travel policies are usually experienced by citizens living in underdeveloped and/or corrupt country contexts, in which the legitimization of a state that is failing to deliver for its citizens in the long run might severely worsen the quality of government services. Moreover, the simple inability to travel and/or to permanently emigrate aboard might affect psychological well-being for millions of people living in countries with poor government quality across the world (Jost and Hunyady, 2003; Napier et al. 2020). This dissertation is filling two major gaps in the extant literature. As both the input and the output determinants of legitimacy in electoral autocracies are subject to scrutiny (Luhrman, et al. 2018; Rothstein, 2009; Tyler and Huo, 2002; Dahlberg et al., 2015), it is unclear what motivates citizens in electoral autocracies to comply despite democracy being flawed, the economy often being underdeveloped and public institutions offer suffering from high levels of corruption. Moreover, little research has been done on the effects of external policies on the legitimacy of the state domestically. In order to answer the main research question, I combine insights from system justification theory (SJT) (Jost and Banaji, 1994) and the literature on state legitimacy (Tyler, 2006a; Rothstein, 2009). SJT has been developed to explain people's tendency to support the status quo, especially in situations in which bolstering the status quo seems to go against self- or group-based interests (Friesen et al. 2019 p. 316). One section of this literature has focused on examining situational factors in which system justification is more likely to occur and showed that the feeling of system inescapability is one of them (Friesen et al. 2019; Laurin, et al., 2010; Proudfoot et al., 2015). Extending existing findings from SJT, I argue that restrictive travel policies introduced to a country from abroad will increase the feeling of inescapability, and in turn, have a positive effect on legitimacy evaluations. Overall, this dissertation attempts to extend the depth (psychological mechanisms) and the scope (foreign policy) of political science research on legitimacy in the setting in which legitimization is unlikely to occur (electoral autocracies). The dissertation consists of three substantive chapters that all contribute towards answering the research question in different ways. Based on 21 semi-structured in-depth interviews with the citizens of Serbia - a typical case of electoral autocracy - Chapter 1 provides input on the valid operationalization of state legitimacy and its institutional level determinants for Chapter 2 (Gallagher, 2013). In Chapter 2, I conduct a survey experiment in Serbia, in order to examine the effects of future introduction of a restrictive travel policy scheduled to be implemented in 2024 by the EU on citizens' perceptions of state legitimacy. Since paying tax is argued to be a behaviour that captures the concept of state legitimacy well (Levi et al. 2009), in Chapter 3, I examine the effects of experimentally manipulated visa policies - a form of restrictive travel policy - on tax compliance by running two experiments based on a tax evasion game (Friedland et al. 1978). Taken together, the results provide some initial empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis that restrictive travel policies implemented from abroad might positively affect citizens' perceptions of state legitimacy in their own country. As the empirical results are based on originally collected data from an electoral autocracy (or based on some of its features replicated in a lab-based setting) for which the existing political science literature would argue that legitimization is less likely to occur, this dissertation invites future research in examining the interplay between psychological need for better life and the often-unfavorable institutional reality.
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Trinity Research in Social Sciences
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https://tcdlocalportal.tcd.ie/pls/EnterApex/f?p=800:71:0::::P71_USERNAME:MILOSAVODescription:
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Author: Milosav, Đorđe
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D'Arcy, MichellePublisher:
Trinity College Dublin. School of Social Sciences & Philosophy. Discipline of Political ScienceType of material:
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