In the face of public contestation, international organizations (IOs) invoke norms in their public communication to enhance relevant audiences' legitimacy beliefs. This article offers the first comprehensive analysis of what we term normative diversity in IOs' discursive legitimation by drawing on a novel dataset on norm-based justifications in more than 32,000 paragraphs of text published by 28 regional IOs between 1980 and 2019. We show that IOs vary strikingly in this respect: whereas some IOs invoke a narrow set of norms, often focused on economic welfare and functional capability, others engage a wide variety that includes security, national sovereignty, democracy or human rights. To explain this variance, we specify and test an explanatory framework that emphasizes IO audiences, agents and peer organizations as distinct origins. Our statistical analysis reveals that IOs diversify their discursive legitimation to 1) address heterogeneous audiences, 2) reconcile competing beliefs amongst agents themselves, and 3) integrate the legitimation of peer IOs. These findings indicate that IOs respond to the growing complexity of international cooperation in their discursive legitimation and may raise policy-makers' awareness of the difficulties in contemporary legitimation efforts.

中文翻译：

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代理人、听众和同行：国际组织为何使其合法化话语多样化

面对公众争论，国际组织 (IO) 在其公共传播中援引规范来增强相关受众的合法性信念。本文通过在 1980 年至 2019 年间由 28 个区域 IO 发布的超过 32,000 段文本中利用基于规范的理由的新数据集，首次对我们称之为 IO 话语合法性的规范多样性进行了全面分析。我们表明 IO在这方面差异显着：虽然一些国际组织援引一套狭窄的规范，通常侧重于经济福利和功能，但其他国际组织则涉及范围广泛的规范，包括安全、国家主权、民主或人权。为了解释这种差异，我们指定并测试了一个解释性框架，该框架强调 IO 受众、代理人和同行组织是不同的来源。我们的统计分析表明，IOs 将其话语合法化多样化，以 1) 解决不同的受众，2) 协调代理人之间的竞争信念，以及 3) 整合同行 IOs 的合法化。这些发现表明，国际组织在其话语合法化中对日益复杂的国际合作做出了回应，并可能提高决策者对当代合法化努力中困难的认识。