Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Impact of Expectations of Legislative Processes on Legitimacy Perceptions

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Representation, for the most part, works. Public opinion drives policy output and change most of the time. Yet, many citizens believe that representatives cannot be trusted to respond to public needs and interests. This dissertation examines the sources and content of people's expectations of the legislative process to help reconcile this apparent contradiction. A theory of public opinion is developed; this theory is based on mounting evidence that people's overall evaluations of the legitimacy of decision-making authorities are influenced by their perceptions of procedural fairness. Most American today do not believe that the legislative process is impartial. Instead, many citizens believe that the process is susceptible to pressure from interest groups and business organizations, and, thus, it creates a discrepancy between how people want government towork and how they perceive that it does work. Although it is part of the story, this discordance by itself cannot explain fully why so many Americans are skeptical of the legitimacy of the legislative process. I content that underlying widespread condemnation of government is an increasing conflict of expectations of the market with those of poliitics. People, in this theory, increasingly expect from the legislative process the same degree of efficiency, accountability, and equality of opportunity that the perceive the market offers, even though pluralist mechanisms of government cannot match these economic ideals. Thus, the goal of this project is to demonstrate that underlying broad antipathy toward government is a fundamental inconsistency between citizens' expectations of legislative processes and what is possible within the institutional requirements of a pluralist democracy. This thesis is tested in two ways. First, I use a survey that includes questions from McClosky and Zaller's Opinions and Values of Americans Scale for Capitalist and Democratic Values. The survey also includes items from the standard cross-sections of the National Election Studies as well as questions of my own design. Finally, the postulated psychological mechanism derived from Tyler's work on procedural justice is isolated using an original experiment.