| 1. |
- Agné, Hans, et al.
(författare)
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Does stakeholder involvement foster democratic legitimacy in international organizations? An empirical assessment of a normative theory
- 2015
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Ingår i: The Review of International Organizations. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1559-7431 .- 1559-744X. ; 10:4, s. 465-488
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The involvement of non-state organizations in global governance is widely seen as an important step toward global democracy. Proponents of "stakeholder democracy" argue that stakeholder organizations, such as civil society groups and other non-state actors, may represent people significantly affected by global decisions better than elected governments. In this article we identify a particularly promising sociological variant of this argument, test it against new evidence from a large-scale survey among stakeholder organizations with varying levels of involvement in international organizations (IOs), and find that the suggested stakeholder mechanism for producing democratic legitimacy in global governance does not work. Stakeholder involvement is unproductive for democratic legitimacy in IOs as perceived by stakeholders themselves. We suggest alternative explanations of this finding and argue that empirical analysis is useful for adjudicating normative arguments on the viability of stakeholder democracy in global governance.
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| 2. |
- Dellmuth, Lisa Maria, 1981-, et al.
(författare)
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Why national and international legitimacy beliefs are linked : Social trust as an antecedent factor
- 2020
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Ingår i: The Review of International Organizations. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1559-7431 .- 1559-744X. ; 15:2, s. 311-337
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recent public opinion research has established an empirical regularity of unusual stability and strength: citizen beliefs in the legitimacy of national and international institutions are highly linked. The dominant interpretation of this link holds that citizens draw on their perceptions of national institutions as a heuristic when forming opinions about international institutions. This article proposes an alternative mechanism, privileging social trust as an antecedent factor contributing to both national and international legitimacy beliefs. Using original survey data on citizen attitudes toward four international institutions in three countries, the article provides evidence for social trust as an antecedent factor, while granting no support for the dominant interpretation. The article suggests three broader implications: social trust has more far-reaching consequences for international cooperation than previously understood; political efforts to affect the legitimacy of international institutions are constrained by individual predispositions; and a comparative approach is central to the study of public attitudes toward international institutions.
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| 3. |
- Goenaga, Agustín, et al.
(författare)
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The state does not live by warfare alone : War and revenue in the long nineteenth century
- 2023
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Ingår i: The Review of International Organizations. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1559-7431 .- 1559-744X. ; 18:2, s. 393-418
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Previous research shows that wars contributed to the expansion of state revenues in the Early Modern period and in the twentieth century. There are, however, few cross-national studies on the long nineteenth century. Using new unbalanced panel data on wars and public revenues from 1816 to 1913 for 27 American and European countries, this article provides new evidence that military conflicts very rarely triggered lasting increases in public revenues during those years. We argue that the uneven diffusion of military innovations reduced the probability that international wars would be sufficiently intense to push state actors to seek additional resources. Moreover, the distinction between international and civil wars was blurred by the opportunities for non-state actors to mobilize military forces comparable to those of the state. Therefore, only very intense international and civil wars had a lasting impact on state revenues, but such conflicts were extremely rare, both in Europe and the Americas.
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| 4. |
- Isaksson, Ann Sofie, et al.
(författare)
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Aid and institutions: Local effects of World Bank aid on perceived institutional quality in Africa
- 2022
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Ingår i: Review of International Organizations. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1559-7431 .- 1559-744X. ; 18, s. 523-551
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Motivated by the lack of sub-national empirical evidence on the relationship between aid and institutional development, this study explores the local effects of World Bank aid on perceived institutional quality in African aid receiving countries. We combine geo-referenced data on the subnational allocation of World Bank aid projects to Africa over the 1995–2014 period with geo-coded survey data for 73,640 respondents across 12 Sub-Saharan African countries. The empirical results, which are robust across a wide range of specifications as well as to using alternative identification strategies, suggest a positive impact of World Bank aid on citizens’ expressed willingness to abide by key formal institutions. This applies for overall World Bank aid, but as may be expected, the estimated effects are more pronounced when restricting our attention to projects focusing on institution building. Notably, the observed effects concern finalized projects, not projects still under implementation, highlighting that institutional change is a slow process.
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| 5. |
- Lundgren, Magnus, 1976, et al.
(författare)
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Introducing the Intergovernmental Policy Output Dataset (IPOD)
- 2024
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Ingår i: Review of International Organizations. - 1559-7431 .- 1559-744X. ; 19, s. 117-146
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- There is a growing recognition that international organizations (IOs) formulate and adopt policy in a wide range of areas. IOs have emerged as key venues for states seeking joint solutions to contemporary challenges such as climate change or COVID-19, and to establish frameworks to bolster trade, development, security, and more. In this capacity, IOs produce both extraordinary and routine policy output with a multitude of purposes, ranging from policies of historic significance like admitting new members to the more mundane tasks of administering IO staff. This article introduces the Intergovernmental Policy Output Dataset (IPOD), which covers close to 37,000 individual policy acts of 13 multi-issue IOs in the 1980-2015 period. The dataset fills a gap in the growing body of literature on the comparative study of IOs, providing researchers with a fine-grained perspective on the structure of IO policy output and data for comparisons across time, policy areas, and organizations. This article describes the construction and coverage of the dataset and identifies key temporal and cross-sectional patterns revealed by the data. In a concise illustration of the dataset's utility, we apply models of punctuated equilibria in a comparative study of the relationship between institutional features and broad policy agenda dynamics. Overall, the Intergovernmental Policy Output Dataset offers a unique resource for researchers to analyze IO policy output in a granular manner and to explore questions of responsiveness, performance, and legitimacy of IOs.
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| 6. |
- Lundgren, Magnus, et al.
(författare)
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Stability and change in international policy-making : A punctuated equilibrium approach
- 2018
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Ingår i: The Review of International Organizations. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1559-7431 .- 1559-744X. ; 13:4, s. 547-572
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- International organizations (IOs) have developed into important policy venues beyond the state. Yet our understanding of the broader dynamics of IO policy-making is limited. This article offers the first comparative analysis of macro patterns in IO policy-making. Theoretically, we draw on punctuated equilibrium theory to develop hypotheses about stability and change in the orientation of IO policy agendas. Empirically, we examine novel data on the policy output of five general-purpose IOs between 1980 and 2015, combining statistical analysis and comparative case illustrations. The analysis yields two central results. First, the policy agendas of all five IOs display patterns of punctuated equilibria, with longer periods of stability interrupted by shorter periods of dramatic change. Second, the level of institutional friction in decision-making contributes to variation in punctuations across IOs and within IOs over time. The results suggest four broader implications: (1) punctuated equilibrium theory applies to a broader empirical domain than previously thought; (2) patterns of change in IOs are more complex than conventionally expected; (3) institutional friction matters for IOs’ responsiveness to societal demands and problem pressures; and (4) deeper integration of punctuated equilibrium theory into the study of IOs can pave the way for a promising IR research agenda.
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| 7. |
- Lundgren, Magnus
(författare)
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Which type of international organizations can settle civil wars?
- 2017
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Ingår i: The Review of International Organizations. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1559-7431 .- 1559-744X. ; 12:4, s. 613-641
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- International organizations (IOs) take on an increasing share of civil war mediation around the world. The determinants of IO mediation effectiveness remain poorly understood, partly because prior research has not adequately captured the institutional heterogeneity of peace-brokering IOs. To explore how mediation effectiveness depends on institutional variation, I combine newly gathered data on the design of 13 peace-brokering IOs with existing data on 109 civil war mediation episodes in the 1975-2004 period. I find that IOs with institutionalized capabilities to deploy field missions, such as peacekeeping operations, outperform other IOs as mediators of civil wars, whereas information-gathering capacity does not yield a significant advantage. The results suggest that IO enforcement assistance has a forward-looking effect: the ability to credibly signal, ex ante, that peacekeeping or monitoring forces will be deployed to enforce an agreement, helps IOs shape negotiations long before forces are actually deployed. Reaffirming the credible commitment theory of conflict resolution, the study demonstrates that there is considerable variation among external guarantors, which explains why some IOs can shift civil war disputants away from violent bargaining strategies whereas other cannot.
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| 8. |
- Perrotta Berlin, Maria, et al.
(författare)
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Trading favors? UN Security Council membership and subnational favoritism in aid recipients
- 2023
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Ingår i: Review of International Organizations. - : Springer International Publishing. - 1559-744X .- 1559-7431. ; 18:2, s. 237-258
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We test the hypothesis that aid recipient governments are better able to utilize aid flows for political favoritism during periods in which they are of geo-strategic value to major donors. We examine the effect of a country’s (non-permanent) membership on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on the subnational distribution of World Bank aid. Specifically, we analyze whether World Bank projects are targeted to subnational regions in which the head of state was born, or to regions dominated by the same ethnic group as that of the head of state. We find that all regions within a recipient country, on average, receive a greater number of aid projects during UNSC membership years. Moreover, a leader’s co-ethnic regions (but not birth regions) receive significantly more World Bank projects and loan commitments during UNSC membership years compared to other years. This effect is driven chiefly by interest-bearing loans from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). Most importantly, we find stronger subnational political bias in aid allocation for aid recipients whose UNSC votes are fully aligned with those of the United States, indicating that exchanges of aid for favors occur in multilateral settings. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
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| 9. |
- Sommerer, T., et al.
(författare)
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Decision-making in international organizations: institutional design and performance
- 2022
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Ingår i: Review of International Organizations. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1559-7431 .- 1559-744X. ; 17, s. 815-845
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- International organizations (IOs) experience significant variation in their decision-making performance, or the extent to which they produce policy output. While some IOs are efficient decision-making machineries, others are plagued by deadlock. How can such variation be explained? Examining this question, the article makes three central contributions. First, we approach performance by looking at IO decision-making in terms of policy output and introduce an original measure of decision-making performance that captures annual growth rates in IO output. Second, we offer a novel theoretical explanation for decision-making performance. This account highlights the role of institutional design, pointing to how majoritarian decision rules, delegation of authority to supranational institutions, and access for transnational actors (TNAs) interact to affect decision-making. Third, we offer the first comparative assessment of the decision-making performance of IOs. While previous literature addresses single IOs, we explore decision-making across a broad spectrum of 30 IOs from 1980 to 2011. Our analysis indicates that IO decision-making performance varies across and within IOs. We find broad support for our theoretical account, showing the combined effect of institutional design features in shaping decision-making performance. Notably, TNA access has a positive effect on decision-making performance when pooling is greater, and delegation has a positive effect when TNA access is higher. We also find that pooling has an independent, positive effect on decision-making performance. All-in-all, these findings suggest that the institutional design of IOs matters for their decision-making performance, primarily in more complex ways than expected in earlier research.
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| 10. |
- Tallberg, Jonas, et al.
(författare)
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Democratic Memberships in International Organizations : Sources of Institutional Design
- 2016
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Ingår i: The Review of International Organizations. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1559-7431 .- 1559-744X. ; 11:1, s. 59-87
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Domestic regime type has emerged a powerful explanation of multiple phenomena in world politics. This article extends this argument to the design of international organizations (IOs), where a profound development in recent decades is growing access for transnational actors (TNAs). While earlier research has shown that democracy in IO memberships helps to explain IO openness, we know little about the mechanisms that drive this effect. This article unpacks the relationship between democratic memberships and IO design by theorizing and assessing the impact of three different constellations of democracies on the openness of IOs. Empirically, we conduct a multivariate analysis of TNA access to 50 IOs from 1950 to 2010, combined with a case study of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Our main findings are three-fold. First, democracy’s effect on openness is primarily a product of the combined weight of democracies within IOs and their resulting capacity to secure support for their polity preferences. Second, in contrast, we only find limited support for a specific influence of new democracies and democratic major powers on IO openness. Third, decision rules that allow for openness reforms to be adopted by a majority of member states facilitate and strengthen the influence of democracies, by reducing the ability of autocracies to block change. The findings have implications for our understanding of institutional design in global governance and democracy’s effects in world politics.
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