The review of international organizations最新文献

What effect does the institutional design of international organizations (IOs) have on their domestic support? In this article, we focus on interactions between citizens’ social identity and institutional characteristics that may have the potential to polarize citizens’ IO attitudes. We argue that citizens’ cosmopolitan identity makes them react in diametrically opposed ways to IO settings on the authority dimension. Transferring more authority to an IO may make citizens with higher levels of cosmopolitan identity more supportive of the IO, while citizens with lower levels of cosmopolitan identity should become even more skeptical. We test our expectations by conducting a factorial survey experiment in six different countries. The empirical results support our argument. As cosmopolitan identity is strongly connected to the newly evolving domestic cleavage regarding international cooperation and global governance, reforms to IO authority settings thus have the potential to further increase the polarization of domestic attitudes toward IOs.

States often receive threats of economic coercion only after committing some transgression. While attention has been given to strategic selection in the imposition of sanctions – the notion that sanctions are imposed only after the threat of sanctions has failed to elicit compliance – selection also occurs at the threat stage. Does the possibility of economic coercion incentivize states to stay in line before they are directly threatened? This article makes two contributions. First, it presents a theory showing how the interaction between different types of threats can alter the strategic context of economic coercion in ways that potentially reverse the results of empirical analysis. It explains that states are likely to issue general threats, or threats targeting the behavior of a group of countries, when sanctions effectiveness is unknown or the identity of noncompliers is difficult to predict. Second, using quasi-experimental techniques, this article demonstrates that states actively manage the risk of losing access to a trade preference program by altering their policies. The article indicates the political consequences of economic linkages may be more extensive than previously believed.

Transparency lies at the heart of canonical theories of international negotiations and institutions—yet it is rarely directly measured or explained. This paper explores the potential downsides of transparency reforms in intergovernmental negotiations and institutions. We argue that as formal international meetings open up to the public, negotiators face incentives to shift deliberations to more informal and opaque venues, especially for sensitive and domestically contested issues. To test when and why this occurs, we present new data on three decades of intergovernmental negotiations in the Council of the European Union (1990–2019), and in particular the use of informal breaks where no minutes are taken. We find that recourse to such breaks—especially at lunch time—has increased substantially, and that ministers often take these opportunities to discuss controversial topics. We deploy quantitative and qualitative analyses to show that variations in informal breaks correlate both with institutional enhancements to transparency and with specific concerns over antagonistic political mobilization at home, notably in the form of Euroscepticism. These findings challenge received positive and normative theories about transparency in international institutions, and contribute to the literature on informal governance, negotiation studies, EU politics, and the transnational democratic deficit.

International institutions are increasingly under attack from their member states, who embark on varying and sometimes escalating modes of contestation. At the same time, states’ negative institutional power, i.e. their opportunities to avoid undesired outcomes in international institutions, has been declining for some time. This paper claims that dissatisfied states’ negative institutional power endowments are key to understanding their varying contestation modes: the more limited (extensive) the negative institutional power of dissatisfied states in an institution, the more radical (moderate) modes of institutional contestation they will choose. We argue that, all else equal, states’ (1) inside options to prevent undesired outcomes within the institution and (2) their outside options to evade undesired outcomes by leaving the institution jointly condition whether they choose a strategy of voice, subversion, exit, or rollback to contest the dissatisfying institution. We assess the plausibility of our Negative Institutional Power Theory (NIPT) by means of four detailed case studies of the Trump Administration’s contestation of the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Paris Agreement, and the Iran Nuclear Deal. We demonstrate the generalizability of our arguments by assessing our claims across eight additional instances of other dissatisfied powers’ contesting different international institutions. The twelve case studies demonstrate that negative power matters for states’ choice of institutional contestation modes. Our findings suggest that whether, in the future, international institutions will be increasingly challenged from within and outside, can be influenced by reforms that grant (or deny) states negative institutional power.

Populism is often assumed to undermine the liberal world order, but this claim has never been tested systematically. In this study, we do so for the first time. Based on an understanding of populism as a “thin-centered ideology” entailing anti-elitism and people-centrism, we expect populist governments to have foreign policy preferences opposed to the core features of the US-led liberal international order. Our empirical analysis assesses government preferences on the liberal international order as expressed through UN General Assembly votes. Our findings support the expectation that populism has a strong and statistically significant negative impact on foreign policy preferences related to the core norms of the liberal international order. Moreover, we find that populists with a left-wing ideology and those in less democratic countries tend to be more opposed to the US-led liberal international order. However, populist governments do not reject the UNGA as such, as they are not more likely to be absent from UNGA votes than other states. Thereby, this study makes a contribution both to the burgeoning literature on the international implications of populism and to debates on the crisis of the liberal order.

Can individual participation in international legal institutions affect state behavior? Much of the existing literature believes that international law has a limited effect in the countries where it’s needed the most, especially in the absence of enforcement mechanisms. Focused on repressive regimes, this paper analyzes petitions (complaints) filed by victims of human rights abuse in United Nations human rights treaty bodies. As a form of naming and shaming, I theorize that violation decisions– in which a monitoring body confirms a treaty violation– may improve human rights when paired with civil society organizations that publicize the decisions. Leveraging a new dataset, I find that governments improve respect for the most severe abuses involving bodily harm immediately after violation decisions. In support of the theory, these short-lived effects are driven by petitions where civil society actors are listed as representation. This work improves our understanding of the role of non-state actors in global politics and compliance with international institutions. International organizations can, under certain conditions, provide information on non-compliance that sufficiently pressures governments to change domestic practices and decrease repression.

The existing literature argues that the left is generally more supportive of multilateralism in foreign policy than the right. However, the impact of ideology on state commitment to multilateral cooperation have not yet been empirically tested adequately. We assess the presence of such a left–right divide on state commitment to multilateral treaties employing an original dataset, containing all the available information about the ratification of the multilateral treaties deposited with the UN Secretary General since 1945. Our results indicate that indeed countries led by left-wing leaders are generally faster at ratifying treaties than those led by right-wing leaders. However, the association between leader ideology and commitment to multilateral treaties is substantially conditioned by regime type and the international context. In fact, we find robust evidence of a significant gap in ratification duration between states led by left-wing and right-wing leaders in democracies but not in other regime types, and during the Cold War but not after. Through such findings, this article provides a contribution to the debate on the impact of ideology on international relations and the drivers of global support for multilateralism.

Countries today navigate a multipolar world defined by tensions between great powers. How do middle powers, small states, and Global South countries fare in this geopolitical landscape? Can they shape new international agreements on emerging, divisive topics, like trade-and-environment issues? To explore this question, I investigate the twenty years of negotiations that led to a new treaty seeking to preserve the global commons: the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies (AFS). Using text-as-data analyses and a rich trove of WTO documents, I investigate the sources of the treaty text. I find that middle powers, small states, and countries from the Global South contributed to the agreement; they did so by forming coalitions with like-minded countries. The findings demonstrate that a wider range of states can effectively participate in international negotiations than traditionally assumed.

How do states react to adverse decisions resulting from human rights treaties’ individual complaint procedures? While recent scholarship has shown particular interest in states’ reactions to international court judgments, research on state behavior vis-à-vis an increasing treaty body output remains scarce. I argue that states generally want to avoid the costs implied by adverse decisions, or ‘views’. Rising numbers of rebukes lead them to update their beliefs about the costliness of complaint procedure acceptance in a Bayesian manner. As a result, states become less inclined to accept further petition mechanisms under different human rights treaties. I test these assumptions on an original dataset containing information on individual complaint procedure acceptance and the distribution of 1320 views for a total number of 169 countries ranging from the year 1965 to 2018. Results from Cox proportional hazards regressions suggest that both the number of views against neighboring states and against the examined state itself decrease the likelihood of acceptance of most of the six individual complaint procedures under observation. I also find evidence that this effect is exacerbated if states are more likely to actually bear the costs of implementation. Findings indicate that the omission of further commitment can be a negative spillover of the treaty bodies’ quasi-judicial output.

International organizations promoting democratic governance and human rights are increasingly challenged by some of their own member states. To better understand this dynamic, we propose a distinction between the illiberal ideology of political parties and their regime environment, aiming to examine the international behavior of actors extending beyond autocratic governments. We argue that the domestic regime environment plays a pivotal role in influencing the extent to which illiberal parties engage in contestation to undermine liberal norms on the international stage. We expect contestation behavior to be primarily driven by illiberal parties seeking to diminish the influence of liberal international politics on domestic power structures. Moreover, we contend that government participation moderates illiberal parties’ contestation behavior. To test our expectations empirically, we study roll call votes in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), one of the most powerful international parliaments promoting liberal values. Drawing on an original dataset that records approximately 500,000 individual votes cast in PACE decisions, we find evidence for substantive contestation by illiberal parties, especially those representing illiberal regimes. Only illiberal governments in liberal systems moderate themselves at the amendment stage. Our study has implications for the potential threat that emerging illiberal actors pose to international liberal institutions.