Accountability’s Effect: Reaction Speed and Legitimacy in Global Governance

Abstract

This article examines whether and how accountability in international organizations (IOs) influences their speed of reaction to economic and humanitarian crises. Reaction speed is one among several factors in the capacity of IOs to handle crisis-like problems and, therefore, also a factor in their capacity to create legitimacy for themselves. Original theoretical arguments and statistical survival analyses of the time it takes for IOs to react to crises confirm that accountability in IOs indeed affects reaction speed. However, the effect varies depending on the use of alternative accountability mechanisms. Transparency speeds up reactions while stakeholder participation slows them down. More generally, this article identifies synergies, trade-offs, and nonlinear relationships between reaction speed and different accountability mechanisms that should be reflected in debates on legitimacy in global governance as well as in the institutional design of legitimate IOs.