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James Rosenau and Monica Lewinsky

Throughout the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, media pundits and commentators puzzled and despaired that Americans were not more outraged at their president's behavior (Kurtz 1998). Opinion poll after poll showed that most Americans believed the president had an affair with the White House intern and lied about it, gave Clinton very high approval ratings, and disapproved of the House members conducting the impeachment trial. How could Americans give high ratings to an admitted lecher, liar, and adulterer? What were Americans' values? Was Clinton the new "Teflon President?" Why? My colleagues and I at the Catholic University of America fielded numerous queries from reporters who could not reconcile the public's reaction to the scandal with the rise of the Christian Right, Promise Keepers, and the Million Man and Million Woman Marches.

After much deliberation, I have concluded that a theory advanced by James Rosenau, an international relations theorist from George Washington University who studies changes in the system of sovereign states, can lead to an explanation of the U.S. public's reaction.

Rosenau (1990, 1995; Rosenau and Fagen 1997) has contended that globalization and the spread of technology has made citizens more skillful in gathering and using a variety of information and analyzing how it affects them. This information and skills revolution has changed the nature of political authority. As regimes in China, Nigeria, Indonesia, and South Africa have learned, citizens are becoming less deferential to traditional sources and claims of authority and legitimacy and are paying more attention to the performance of their leaders. According to Rosenau, citizens are beginning to judge the legitimacy of state leaders not by whether they adhere to moral or spiritual standards (traditional legitimacy claims), but by competence.

During the Middle Ages, church and state used to compete for the allegiance (and taxes and military service) of citizens. Sovereignty, or the system of having only one source of political control or authority over one piece of territory, was a rejection of the church's claims of jurisdiction. The church may have sway over all men's souls, the Treaty of Westphalia admitted in 1648, but only one sovereign could govern the people in any specific territory. In an economic system where labor, capital, and the means of production were fixed,...