Descriptive Legitimacy and International Organizations: Evidence from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

Despite the growing importance of race and gender on legitimacy in domestic settings, few studies have investigated this issue among international organizations. We examine this relationship through a survey experiment of American citizens’ response to an investigation of US refugee policy by a fact-finding team sponsored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the aftermath of the 2018 Central American refugee crisis along the Mexico-US border. Overall, we find that UNHCR investigation panel composition that has a racial and gender balance is generally perceived as the most legitimate. Greater racial and gender diversity consistently increases public perceptions of fairness and trust in the UNHCR panel. Second, the impact of diversity is conditioned on the nature of the UNHCR panel report. In the context of an undesirable report, greater gender and racial diversity increases respondents’ acceptance of panel investigations, suggesting that descriptively representative panels improve the perception of substantive legitimacy of panel decisions.