Abstract
Our contribution to this symposium speaks to the origins of international organization (IO) reputation. The one explored by Daugirdas is agency slack: when people delegated power and authority within an organization—in her example, UN peacekeepers and their surrounding bureaucracy—abuse their privilege and stain the institution's character. We explore another that can spark similar reactions and consequences, but which emanates from the behavior of the principals themselves (rather than their agents): the member states. The company an IO keeps—how members behave—can bolster or stain the organization's reputation. That in turn can have consequences, especially for organizations seeking to provide a venue for members to make credible commitments.
Highlights
Our contribution to this symposium speaks to the origins of international organization (IO) reputation
While the logic we develop applies to many domains, we draw here upon our own research on foreign direct investment (FDI) to illustrate how “the company you keep” generates IO reputations that may have direct costs or benefits to the membership
A canonical commitment problem with far reaching implications concerns the issue of FDI
Summary
A key insight emerging in the field of international relations is that IOs generate reputations based not on their stated goals and rules and on the behavior of their membership. These reputations provide information to relevant audiences that can help or undermine an organization’s goals, quite apart from what the rules of the organization say or the way its agents behave. ** Associate Professor and Jean Monnet Chair at the Department of Political Science at UCSD. 1 Kristina Daugirdas, Reputation as a Disciplinarian of International Organizations, 113 AJIL 221 (2019)
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