The review of international organizations最新文献

Liberal democracy is facing renewed challenges from a growing group of states undergoing democratic backsliding. While entrenched autocrats have long resented and contested the established liberal order, we know far less about how newer backsliding states behave on the international stage. We argue these states, who joined prominent western liberal institutions prior to their backsliding, will use their established membership in these organizations both to protect themselves from future scrutiny regarding adherence to liberal democratic values and to oppose the prevailing western liberal norms that increasingly conflict with their evolving interests. Using voting data from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) from 2006-2021, we show that backsliding states are more likely to vote against targeted resolutions that name and shame specific countries. We supplement this analysis with detailed data from the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and combine regression analysis and a structural topic model (STM) to show that backsliding states are more critical in their UPR reports when evaluating advanced western democracies, and more likely to emphasize issues that align with their own interests while de-emphasizing ones that might threaten government power and control over citizens.

The growing literature explaining why repressive regimes ratify human rights treaties fails to explain why some regimes take the additional step to delegate authority to their people to file international legal complaints while others do not. I examine individual petition mechanisms in the United Nations which allow individuals to file complaints to an overseeing treaty body. I argue that repressive regimes face international incentives to signal their commitment to the European Union, a global power with a strong and continued interest in the global human rights regime. Repressive regimes, however, only ratify agreements when they perceive low domestic costs with little institutional constraints on the executive. In support of my theory, I find that repressive regimes are more likely to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights’ Optional Protocol allowing individual petitions when they are trade dependent on the EU while facing lesser institutional constraints, both legislative and judicial. The results are similar to explaining treaty ratification, but the interaction is substantively larger for OP ratification among repressive countries, highlighting the increased costs repressive leaders face to allowing individual petitions. Individual standing in the overseeing body of the ICCPR is one example of non-state actor access in international institutions, which is an important component of understanding institutional design and compliance.

States must navigate the structure of the international system in their relations with other states. One crucial component of this structure are rivalries as they indicate latent threat to states. Rivalries should thus influence how states behave within the given system, but also how they seek to shape and restructure it. Focusing on arms transfers, we clarify how the systemic structure implied by rivalries drives states’ efforts to engage in security cooperation with other states. Intuitively, a rivalry with another country should diminish an exporter’s propensity to transfer weapons there. But what is more, we argue that rivalries outside of this focal dyad matter as a potential importer’s enmity towards other countries will reveal information about its security interests to the exporter. Specifically, sharing rivalries with the same set of countries will signal to the exporter that there is a congruence in security interests and thus facilitate security cooperation. This security cooperation should take the form of arms transfers, at least if exporters value buck-passing and fear entrapment. We test our expectations using original data on Major Conventional Weapons transfers in the Interwar years, a period where this condition likely holds, and inferential network analysis models. Sharing rivals increases two countries’ probability to trade arms whereas a rivalry between countries exhibits no effect. This research contributes to our understanding of security cooperation, the arms trade, and networked international relations.

Why do democracies experience financial crises more often than non-democracies? Revisiting the 2008 Great Financial Crisis (GFC) as a significant and informative test case, I argue that considering the way domestic institutions inhere in system-level structures is important to explaining crisis susceptibility among democracies since the turn of the twenty-first century. I introduce the mechanism of co-regime financial connections in showing that regime type is an important systematic feature of global financial flows. Employing a latent space network regression model using IMF Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS), I find that the network of cross-border portfolio asset investments is systematically patterned by co-democracy pairs. I then show that this regime-patterned interdependence affects increased financial crisis susceptibility among democracies. My findings build on literature highlighting the interdependence between domestic- and system-level factors and inform an empirical puzzle regarding the prevalence of financial crises among democracies.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and the declining effectiveness of antibiotic medicines due to misuse are among the biggest threats to global health and a major challenge for global governance in this century. Since drug-resistant bacteria spread easily across borders, government policies that exacerbate or mitigate AMR affect other countries. International organizations and governments addressed the global public good of maintaining antimicrobial protection by creating a soft governance regime largely devoid of legally binding rules and enforcement mechanisms. This article presents a cross-national empirical assessment of the effectiveness of the international AMR regime combining novel data on national action plans and data on antibiotic consumption in 191 countries between 2000 and 2018. We find that the regime sets ambitious goals and achieves broad participation, substantial implementation, and meaningful change in the use of antibiotics. The involvement of the largest consumers of antibiotics has been crucial for both effectiveness and equity.

Although the European Union (EU) is considered unrivaled in its democracy promoting abilities, democracy is being challenged within its borders. Over the last decade, Hungary’s ruling party has debilitated or eliminated liberal democratic institutions; similar trends have emerged in Poland and other new democracies in the EU. What explains these surprising cases of democratic backsliding? Researchers have identified the limits of conditionality and the EU’s inability to counteract backsliding. However, given the EU’s extensive role in democracy building in its member states, it is critical to also consider the EU as an initial source of backsliding. This paper argues that the EU’s post-Maastricht policy structure, accession process, and membership requirements have made democratic backsliding more likely in new democracies by simultaneously increasing executive power and limiting states’ domestic policy space, which stunts institutional development. This combination of factors creates opportunities for executives to manipulate already weak institutions to increase their power, and democratic backsliding becomes more likely. A comparative analysis that combines typical and control cases provides support for this argument. These findings extend beyond the EU to contribute to emerging research on the limits of international democracy promotion and the related long-term effects that international organizations have on domestic democratic institutional development.

Regime complexity characterizes the international system, as many international organizations (IOs) overlap in membership and competencies at the same time. Unmanaged overlaps endanger the effectiveness of IOs. Inter-organizational cooperation can mitigate such negative consequences. However, a novel dataset reveals that not all overlapping IOs cooperate with each other and the institutionalization of cooperation agreements varies. Why do some but not all overlapping IOs opt for cooperation agreements, and why do their designs vary? The analysis of a demand–supply–restraint model shows that increased exposure to overlaps creates a demand for IOs to reach cooperation agreements and for their strong institutionalization. States respond more favourable to the supply of cooperation agreements when they are used to international cooperation and internal authority-delegation. The restraint component underscores that IOs are less inclined to cooperate when ideological differences and power differentials between them are greater and that IOs choose highly institutionalized cooperation agreements when their ideological differences are limited.