Symbols on Parade: Comparing Government Symbols and Legitimacy Attitudes across the Three Branches

Governments are highly symbolic entities, featuring constellations of symbols such as grand buildings, prestigious offices, official seals, and other various embellishments. These symbols are common artifacts of politics that citizens routinely encounter throughout their lives. Curiously, there is little that we know about how these symbols matter to political life. This dissertation takes aim at this large gap in existing knowledge, posing the following questions: (1) how do government symbols shape people’s attitudes towards government and (2) under what conditions are symbols more (or less) effective to that end? To address this question, I offer a general theoretical framework arguing that such symbols work like cues that, upon exposure, bring to people’s minds thoughts related to power and procedural justice which, in turn, reinforce their sense of legitimacy towards the institution. This dissertation applies my theory in the context of the U.S. federal government as such symbols are featured across its three branches—legislative, executive, and judicial. Using multiple online surveys, I explored and compared the effects of exposure to varying government symbols on legitimacy attitudes. Overall, I find limited and nuanced support for my theory. Chapter 3 establishes that exposure to government symbols does elicit thoughts related to power (irrespective of institution), yet Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate this does not directly translate to enhanced legitimacy attitudes. Instead, I find that government symbols appear to amplify pre-existing attitudes towards a given institution, and that these effects are mostly limited to the judicial context