The review of international organizations最新文献

This article examines why some states emerging through decolonization are more actively contributing to international organizations (IOs) than others, focusing on their voluntary financial contributions to the United Nations System (UN). I argue that the birth legacies of states, particularly modes of decolonization, significantly influence their subsequent financial contributions to the UN. A regression analysis of 95 former colonies, mandates, and dependencies suggests that states with a negative legacy – derelict decolonization – provide larger financial contributions to the UN. This finding highlights the impact of colonial history on state behavior within IOs and suggests that former colonies may seek active participation in global governance, valuing international resources highly.

This introduction to the Special Issue reviews the existing literature on the domestic politics of international organizations (IOs), presenting them within a unified theoretical framework. We emphasize the central role of domestic forces in the study of IOs: how individual preferences are channeled through domestic political institutions, and ultimately inform a government’s foreign policy decisions toward and within IOs. We show that these forces can be distilled into a game between citizens in which they select welfare weights to be assigned to citizens across the globe. We refer to this as the Citizens’ IO Game. The contributions in this Special Issue and previous studies are discussed in the framework of the Citizens’ IO Game, which offers fresh insights into the intersection of domestic constitutions, politics, resource distribution, and IO membership and policy. We construct a specific application to trade policy to further clarify the role of the framework. Using this example, we show that global externalities can never be fully internalized through IOs when sovereignty is prioritized. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research on the domestic politics of IOs.

International law reparations follow the principle of restitutio in integrum — to make the victim whole. But how do human rights judges apply this principle in practice when the victims are not states, but people whose lives may have been irreparably damaged? We examine this question in the context of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, where judges have frequently dealt with cases of forced disappearance, extrajudicial execution, and other severe physical integrity violations. Inter-American Court judges have substantial discretion in determining the value of awards, which provides the opportunity to create and apply their own criteria for justness. We argue that the awarding of damages is best understood as judges attempting to quantify, and, therefore, compensate suffering. However, judges must balance the goal of compensating suffering with economic and political considerations. We test these implications using an original dataset of monetary damages and victims in Inter-American Court of Human Rights cases through 2019 and find that the severity of rights violations, the number of victims involved in a case, and the identity of victims are associated with the value of monetary damages awarded by the IACtHR.

This study presents the “Russia Visits Dataset,” which records high-level visits by Russian leaders to foreign countries from 1991 to 2023, including official trips by presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers. Using probit regression analysis, the study reveals that strategic interests—such as political, economic, and military factors—predominantly shape the distribution of Russian leader visits, while domestic influences are found to have a limited role. The analysis also emphasizes the importance of international organizations, particularly the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), as a key driver of Russian state visits. The results suggest that previous visits by different leaders influence subsequent visits, indicating a coordinated and sequential approach to Russian diplomacy. The “Russia Visits Dataset” serves as a valuable resource for understanding the dynamics of Russian foreign policy and provides a foundation for future research into the motivations, impacts, and diplomatic strategies of Russian leader visits.

We explore the role of global value chains (GVCs) in the design of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). We propose a theory that focuses on firms involved in GVC activities to identify the main actors pushing for deep trade integration. To address the critical issue of endogeneity of GVC trade flows for trade policy, our identification strategy exploits a transportation shock: the sharp increase in the maximum size of container ships, which more than quadrupled between 1995 and 2017. The key variation in our instrument hinges on the fact that only deep-water ports can accommodate these new larger ships. Armed with this instrument, we find that GVC trade increases the probability of forming deep PTAs that include provisions regulating both trade-related policies and domestic regulatory regimes. GVC trade is a driver of deep preferential trade liberalization.

Under what conditions are new democracies more committed to human rights? Existing explanations focus on the logic of the democratic lock-in as elites in new democracies commit their countries to international human rights treaties and organizations to safeguard against future nondemocratic threats. However, this proposition receives mixed empirical support within the literature, and suffers of endogeneity as it treats all democratization episodes as equivalent. Building on insights from the democratization literature, this paper develops a novel theoretical framework that provides a more direct explanation on the conditions under which political elites in new democracies are more likely to commit to human rights treaties. Using a new measure of returning autocratic elites and an instrumental variable design, the results show that democratic cabinets with a higher share of former autocratic elites are less committed to the international human rights regime. These results have implications for democratic consolidation and human rights compliance.

Member state participation is essential in global governance, affording international organizations (IOs) legitimacy and translating member state preferences into institutional attention. We contend that institutional leadership positions bolster states’ authority via “proxy representation,” in which states are grouped together and indirectly represented by one leader. We argue that by serving as proxy group leaders, even relatively weak states can obtain greater influence in IOs. We examine these expectations in the context of the IMF’s Executive Board, where wealthy states represent themselves directly while other states belong to multi-member constituencies in which leadership often rotates among members. Focusing on issues related to climate change discussions at the IMF—a key concern for Global South countries and an increasingly important issue in international finance—we examine the extent to which countries’ preferences over climate issues are expressed at IMF Board meetings. Using textual data based on 52,551 internal IMF documents from 1987-2017, we find evidence to support our theoretical expectations; states more effectively advance their preferences when they are proxy leaders — this finding holds robustly even for otherwise weak states. These results suggest that even in IOs with highly asymmetric decision-making, weaker states can gain voice through proxy representation. This has important and positive implications for IO legitimacy, as member state participation is integral to the livelihood of these institutions.

Past studies in political economy have established a link between domestic property rights protection and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. However, the underlying mechanism remains unclear, given that foreign investors often enjoy more robust property rights protection through international arbitration under investment treaties or potential intervention by their home governments. In this article, we develop a demand-side theory of how domestic property rights affect the flow of FDI into authoritarian regimes. Specifically, dictators with weaker property rights can extract more rents through restrictive FDI policies due to their greater ability to expropriate domestic enterprises than foreign ones. As competition from foreign investors decreases domestic firms’ profits, these dictators tend to impose stricter FDI regulations to maximize rent extraction, despite the potential benefits of FDI for regime stability through wage increases. Therefore, the relationship between domestic property rights and FDI is driven by dictators’ demand, even if foreign investors’ supply remains constant. This article advances our understanding of the determinants of economic liberalization and the effects of FDI in authoritarian regimes.

This data article introduces IOParlspeech, an original dataset of over 600,000 statements on international organizations (IOs) in parliamentary debates in six countries between 1990 and 2018. We explain the creation of the dataset and demonstrate the value of IOParlspeech through two exploratory studies. First, we examine which actors convey more positive and more negative sentiment regarding IOs in parliamentary discourse. Contributing to research on IO contestation, we demonstrate that parliamentarians from the radical right and left, as well as parliamentarians in opposition, use more negative language in their IO-related communication. Second, we explore the salience of IOs in national parliaments. Speaking to debates about the democratic deficit of IOs, we show that IOs with higher authority and those with an international parliamentary institution are more likely to be discussed in parliament. We conclude by suggesting further uses for IOParlspeech.

Existing United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voting databases provide excellent coverage of UNGA voting on resolutions adopted by roll-call vote. These databases, however, have known limitations: The United Nations Digital Library only covers final decisions on adopted resolutions, not prior resolution-related decisions nor decisions on failed resolutions. Coverage of roll-call votes in the widely-used database provided by Bailey, Strezhnev and Voeten is broader but reflects limitations in the historical datasets on which the database is built (e.g., the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research dataset). As a result, voting coverage and what is reported vary over time. In this paper, we present a new dataset that expands and improves the consistency of the UNGA decisions covered. We provide comparisons of our database with other UNGA datasets and explore the implications of more complete data for existing and future research.