Decision-Making in International Organizations: Actors, Preferences, and Institutions

Abstract

International organizations (IOs) experience significant variation in their capacity to adopt new policies. While some are efficient decision-making machineries, others are plagued by gridlock. How can such variation be explained? This paper offers the first systematic and comparative analysis of the decision-making capacity of IOs. Empirically, we map and evaluate the decision-making capacity of 20 IOs over the time period 1980-2015. The dataset operationalizes decision-making capacity as the annual policy output of an IO’s main interstate decision-making body. Theoretically, we advance a rational institutionalist argument centered on three features of the decision-making setting: the number of states, the heterogeneity of their preferences, and the decision rules that govern policy adoption. Broadly in line with the theory, the analysis demonstrates that IOs’ decision-making capacity is adversely affected by large memberships and high preference heterogeneity, and that demanding decision rules aggravate the problem of preference heterogeneity. We find no support for the realist expectation that hegemons pave the way for international cooperation, or for the constructivist expectation that attention to the number of actors and their preferences is misplaced.