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Recent instances of political backlash against global governance efforts as well as conventional wisdom suggest that there is a link between shifting authority from the domestic to the global level, on the one hand, and the legitimacy of global governance institutions as perceived by citizens and other stakeholders on the other. We thus investigate whether and how increasing the authority of a global governance institution affects citizens' legitimacy perceptions, using a population-based survey experiment in Germany and the United States (N=1600 each). The empirical focus is on climate change, a costly and paradigmatic global governance effort. The results show that certain shifts of political authority, such as changes to majority decision making at the international level and automatic implementation of international decisions domestically, do not significantly affect "average" citizens' legitimacy perceptions of global governance institutions. This result is not due to citizens' incapacity to understand the implications of increasing authority, namely, that increasing authority results in a loss of control over climate policy in Germany and the United States. Rather, legitimacy perceptions appear to be shaped by citizens' perceptions of procedural and performance quality of such efforts as well as by their level of cognitive mobilization, namely their interest in international politics. In brief, we find that citizens relate perceived procedural and performance quality of global governance with their evaluation of its legitimacy, but that subtle shifts of authority from the domestic to the global level do not per se affect citizens' legitimacy perceptions.

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Spatial interdependence—the dependence of outcomes in some units on those in others—is substantively and theoretically ubiquitous and central across the social sciences. Spatial association is also omnipresent empirically. However, spatial association may arise from three importantly distinct processes:common exposureof actors to exogenous external and internal stimuli, interdependence of outcomes/behaviors across actors (contagion), and/or the putative outcomes may affect the dimensions along which the clustering occurs (selection). Accurate inference about any of these processes generally requires an empirical strategy that addresses all three well. From a spatial-econometric perspective, this suggests spatiotemporal empirical models with exogenous covariates (common exposure) and spatial lags (contagion), with the spatial weights being endogenous (selection). From a longitudinal network-analytic perspective, the same three processes are identified as potential sources of network effects and network formation. From that perspective, actors' self-selection into networks (by, e.g., behavioralhomophily) and actors' behavior that is contagious through those network connections likewise demands theoretical and empirical models in which networks and behaviorcoevolveover time. This paper begins building such models by, on theoretical side, extending a Markov type-interaction model to allow endogenous tie-formation, and, on empirical side, merging a simplespatial-laglogit model of contagious behavior with a simplep*-logit model of network formation. One interesting consequence of network-behavior coevolution—identically, endogenous patterns of spatial interdependence—emphasized here is how it can produce history-dependent political dynamics, including equilibriumphatand path dependence (Page 2006). The paper concludes with an illustrative application to alliance formation and conflict behavior among the great powers in the first half of the twentieth century.