Design Of International Institutions Research Articles

Hidden figures: how legal experts influence the design of international institutions.

Whose preferences influence the design of international institutions? Scholarship on the legalization of international politics and creation of international legal institutions largely adopts a state-centric perspective. Existing accounts, however, fail to recognize how states often delegate authority over institutional design tasks to independent legal experts whose preferences may diverge from those of states. We develop a principal-agent (PA) framework for theorizing relations between states (collective principals) and legal actors (agents) in the design process, and for explaining how legal actors influence the design of international institutions. The legal dimensions of the PA relationship increase the likelihood of preference divergence between the collective principal and the agent, but also create conditions that enable the agent to opportunistically advance its own design preferences. We argue that the more information on states' preferences the agent has, the more effectively it can exploit its legal expertise to strategically select and justify design choices that maximize its own preferences and the likelihood of states' acceptance. Our analysis of two cases of delegated institutional design concerning international criminal law at the United Nations and the African Union supports our theoretical expectations. Extensive archival and interview data elucidate how agents' variable information on states' preferences affects their ability to effectively advance their design preferences. Our theory reveals how independent legal experts with delegated authority over design tasks influence institutional design processes and outcomes, which has practical and normative implications for the legalization of international politics.

Designing Competition Clauses in Preferential Trade Agreements

AbstractCompetition policy is one important aspect of trade liberalization. However, when examining preferential trade agreements (PTAs), a major type of policy tools to liberalize trade, competition provisions are revealed not to be uniformly distributed across these treaties. What explains the variation in the design of competition clauses in PTAs? Borrowing insights from the rational design of international institutions and combining them with those from treaty ratification and policy diffusion literatures, I identify five major causal mechanisms through which competition provisions are incorporated into PTAs. In evaluating them, I employ a range of operationalization techniques to capture the proposed mechanisms. A treaty-level analysis of 319 PTAs over the period 1960–2015 lends strong and robust support to most of the hypothesized relationships. By integrating theoretical frameworks across international political economy literatures with that from law and economics scholarship, this study demonstrates the utility of political science thinking to the real-world international law-making.

Can the Rational Design of International Institutions Solve Cooperation Problems? Insights from a Systematic Literature Review

Global governance challenges highlight the role of international institutions as problem-solving structures. Institutional design is, more than ever, relevant in this context. The academic literature on this issue is characterized by the existence of consolidated debates such as that of rationalism vs. constructivism, with a focus on making specific contributions to the rational design of international institutions. Koremenos, Lipson, and Snidal (2001) elaborated upon a series of cause-effect conjectures linking cooperation problems, considered independent variables, with institutional design features, considered dependent variables. This research aims to highlight the empirical evidence of the existing debate on this work by conducting a systematic review. Twenty-one quantitative research studies were collected through a screening and selection procedure and were subject to systematization. The findings showed asymmetric approaches to the rational design project, and agreements were the type of international institution that received the most attention from academia. Rationalism was supported by most of the body of literature. However, a broad subgroup of articles complemented this rational approach with other variables or schools of thought, such as those of constructivism and historical institutionalism. The results have relevance for the international institution design literature, as future avenues of potential research are underlined.

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS – PRINCIPALS OR AGENTS? INTERPARADIGM DEBATE BETWEEN NEOLIBERALS AND REALISTS

The role of international organizations becomes especially acute when nation-states cannot establish consensus with regard to local, regional and global issues. Considering that international organizations are made up of members with varying power dynamics, there is often criticism that they represent the interests of power players and not a true consensus-building platform that would enable solving collective issues. The schools of realism and neoliberalism in the framework of International Relations attribute various roles to international organizations (IOs); while the first regard them as mere instruments of nation-states, the latter view them as crucial international players with autonomous status. This article critically evaluates various issues related to the efficiency and design of international institutions in the framework of this interparadigm debate and with consideration of the UN as a prime example. The analysis illustrates that further research in the field of IOs is imperative for both theoretical model-building as well as practical developments in the field. Finding workable models is a vital concern for all international organizations, regardless of their purpose, size and origin.

Challenged in Geneva: WTO Litigation Experience and the Design of Preferential Trade Agreements

AbstractWhat explains the design of international institutions? Existing research has largely neglected how experience in cooperation in one set of international institutions impacts on design choices made by states in other globally-oriented institutions. We contribute to this evolving debate by analyzing spillovers in experience in international trade. We argue that countries' track record of interaction in multilateral trade disputes affects the design of their preferential trade agreements (PTAs). If a country participates in a complaint against a prospective PTA partner at the World Trade Organization (WTO), the challenge in Geneva alerts the defendant's import-competing industries with respect to potential challenges under the planned PTA. As a result, these industries exert pressure on their government to preserve leeway under the future treaty, leading to increased flexibility and a lower level of enforcement in the PTA. We find support for our hypotheses in an empirical analysis of 347 PTAs concluded post 1990.

International institutional design and human rights: The case of the Inter-American Human Rights System:

Most studies examining the effectiveness of international human rights law treat international human rights institutions as equally (un)influential on state behavior. I argue that institutional des...

International institutional design and human rights: The case of the Inter-American Human Rights System

Most studies examining the effectiveness of international human rights law treat international human rights institutions as equally (un)influential on state behavior. I argue that institutional design explains variation in state response to international human rights law. Using the institutions in the Inter-American Human Rights System (Court and Commission), I argue that judgments from the highly legalized body (Court) are associated with human rights improvements, while decisions from the less legalized body (Commission) are associated with a greater likelihood of formal complaints. Using the Ill-Treatment and Torture data and original data on Commission decisions, I find support for these expectations.

Time to move on! Why the discussion about ASEAN’s relevance is outdated

The question of the significance of ASEAN is an important one. Stubbs' observation that different standards have been used to assess the organization is right to the point. This article critically discusses the merits of Stubbs approach and his findings. Our response argues that the binary discussion about ASEAN’s relevance should be replaced by more productive and progressive lines of scientific inquiry, since these questions hardly ever produce the knock-out evidence needed to discard one theory. The more interesting research takes place within paradigms. In the case of institutionalism, this is for example the research program of the design of international institutions. It is here that better data has recently become available, and that some questions that have triggered lively debates on ASEAN can now be answered. We then present select results of a large-N project comparing regional organizations with a view of what we have learned about ASEAN.

Contesting Contested Multilateralism: Why the West Joined the Rest in Founding the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

Abstract This study examines why a large number of Western advanced economies joined the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2015 despite the bank’s purported challenge to the Western-centred international order in the area of multilateral development finance. Through a mixed-method examination involving elite interviews, analyses of government pronouncements and regressions, and by drawing on concepts from rational choice theory, international policy diffusion, and rational design of international institutions, this study finds that the AIIB’s success with regard to its large membership is due to China’s effective creation of a demand for the organization among Western advanced economies. We argue that policymakers in Western countries enjoyed ‘induced agency’, which China granted them in the process of creating the organization and deciding about its membership. First, Western advanced economies had agency because their involvement was needed to prevent the AIIB from becoming a homogenous small organization consisting of Asian debtor countries in favour of a global organization with a heterogeneous group of both debtor and creditor country members. The AIIB was thus set up to accommodate the specific economic and political goals of Western advanced economies. Secondly, Western advanced economies experienced agency in the process of deciding about their membership in the bank because China proactively courted them to join the AIIB. China moreover endorsed the spontaneous intensification of communications that ensued among Western advanced economies with regard to joining the AIIB. Both efforts ultimately resulted in diffusion among them of the decision to become members. Thirdly, the Western advanced economies were granted agency in the process of determining the AIIB’s organizational design, thus allowing them to converge the initially diverse visions for the institutional design of the bank and shift it from contesting the existing system of multilateral development banks to effectively integrating into it. Our study thus advances a theory of country-specific demand for membership in an international organization.

Making Sense of the Design of International Institutions

The design of international institutions varies in many ways: Institutions can be more or less formal, flexible, independent, precise, inclusive, centralized, and so on. This article classifies theoretical efforts to make sense of these similarities and differences. First, some theories focus on the bargains or contracts that attempt to construct equilibrium behavior while other theories analyze institutional design as a dynamic process. Second, theories vary in whether they understand institutional design as a response to the environment in which institutions operate or as a function of the incentives, interests, values, initiatives, and power of the actors that created the institutions. The article discusses four ideal-typical theoretical approaches that fit in each quadrant of the resulting 2×2 typology: rational functionalist, distributive rationalist, historical institutionalist, and structural process theories. These approaches identify different causes for suboptimal or even dysfunctional institutional design: domestic politics, power politics, path dependence, and culture. The conclusion discusses how these theories can help us make sense of current challenges to institutions and their design.

Towards a material politics of socio-technical transitions: Navigating decarbonisation pathways in Malmö

As the politics of climate change shift from the design of international institutions to the pursuit of decarbonisation across multiple sites, researchers are increasingly calling attention to the geography and politics of transitions. We suggest that recent work has so far been limited by its rather incongruous focus on power as a capacity held by individual agents on the basis of the resources which they command, such that the material and relational aspects of socio-technical systems and their dynamics are neglected. In this paper, we bring critical political geographical perspectives to bear on the question of the politics of decarbonisation. Recasting decarbonisation as a matter of political geography then opens up questions of its socio-spatial configuration, its indeterminate and provisional nature as well as the ways in which decarbonisation politics are socio-materially constituted. In Malmö, a city renowned for its attempts to direct urban development towards low carbon futures, we find that decarbonisation is enacted through practices of legibility, demonstration and agreement. These serve to navigate particular junctures and form new socio-material connections and realignments between carbon, capital and infrastructure. We suggest that pathways to decarbonisation are not going to be created by any kind of linear blueprint but through processes that allow them to realign and reorder socio-material relations in new sites and domains across the urban fabric.

International reputation and alliance portfolios: How unreliability affects the structure and composition of alliance treaties

Why do states ever form military alliances with unreliable partners? States sign offensive and defensive military alliances to increase their fighting capabilities in the event of war and as a signal to deter potential aggressors from initiating a crisis. Yet, signing an alliance with an unreliable partner is at odds with both of these rationales. This should be particularly concerning for peace scholars and policymakers, since the uncertainty generated by unreliable partners may increase system-wide conflict. This article provides an answer to this puzzle by arguing that states continue to form alliances with unreliable partners because they can adopt rational portfolio-diversification strategies. Drawing on well-developed models from portfolio theory, we present evidence that states design their overall alliance portfolios to minimize the risks posed by allies with a reputation for being unreliable. Specifically, we show that unreliable allies are more likely to be pooled into multilateral alliances that dilute risk rather than bilateral alliances, and that states allied with unreliable partners form a greater number of alliances to hedge against the added risk of default. Together, our results demonstrate why unreliable partners may not lead to increased conflict initiation, while also providing a novel explanation for previously unexplained variation in the structure of alliance portfolios. The article contributes to the literatures on international reputation and the rational design of international institutions by demonstrating how international reputation matters in subtle and often overlooked ways.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

Reviewed by: Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian Or Rosenboim Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. By Quinn Slobodian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 381. Cloth. $35.00. ISBN 978-0674979529. In recent years, the intellectual foundation of neoliberalism has attracted the attention of historians and economists. Scholars like Angus Burgin and Dotan Leshem have looked to the past to define the meaning of neoliberalism and outline its future trajectories. Quinn Slobodian has made a significant contribution to this growing body of scholarship with his remarkable study of neoliberalism in the twentieth century, Globalists. Slobodian's main thesis in the book is that neoliberalism sought to adapt the liberal market-based global vision to the reality of the modern states-system in the postimperial world. The book's dramatis personae are a group of economists centered on what Slobodian calls the "Geneva School," which included Friedrich Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Heilperin, Lionel Robbins, Gottfried Haberler, and Frieder Roessler. Thus, Slobodian argues that scholars who seek to understand the rise and the meaning of neoliberalism should shift their gaze away from the English-speaking intellectual sphere to the German-speaking one. In this narrative, the Swiss city by the lake becomes a hub of intellectual, political, and economic exchanges between mostly Central European economists—many of them refugees—concerned with the future of liberty after empire. The appropriation of their ideas by American economists in Chicago or by international organizations like the World Trade [End Page 385] Organization came at a later stage. The origins of the neoliberal global worldview were anchored in Europe, and in particular in the political and economic legacy of the Habsburg Empire and fin-de-siècle Vienna. The book's meticulously researched narrative unfolds over seven chapters, each dedicated to a different aspect of the globalists' vision of renewed economic liberalism: from tariffs to federations, from constitutions to new international organizations, the globalists explored a wide range of means to adapt the state to their liberal idea of absolute property rights, wholly integrated world economy, and individual liberty. Writing in the shadow of totalitarianism and fascism, these neoliberals advocated setting constraints to both democracy and nationalism, but they did not wish to abolish the state. But their critique of the ideology of nationalism did not translate into a call to abolish all states or to establish a supranational political system (although some, like Hayek, were at one time federalists). Instead, they sought a structural adjustment that could embed the postimperial world order within an integrated, liberal international institutional design. For them, "order was not a steady state, but an adjustment, an often painful process of learning" (262). The market could not function on its own; the globalists' role was to fine tune its mechanisms and ensure its smooth operation on a global scale. Thus, Slobodian argues that neoliberalism "is less a theory of the market or of economics than of law and the state" (268). The main contribution of this original and compelling study is outlining a new context for assessing and understanding neoliberalism in which the state plays a major role. Politics and the law are now seen to be much more significant in constructing the neoliberal worldview than previously assumed. Slobodian shows how the protagonists of globalist neoliberalism envisioned a range of legal, institutional, and political tools to ensure the integration of the world economy and the preservation of the unequal global power relations after the decline of the European empires. The book is framed as a contextual intellectual history of the economists who constituted the Geneva School, but the contextualization is inevitably partial. Most obviously, the reader lacks a clear view of the political and intellectual opposition to the neoliberal vision. Who was Hayek arguing against? What were the alternative visions and plans of a global order available after 1945? If the core of neoliberalism is to be found in Central Europe, it would be valuable to situate the proposals of the globalist neoliberals within the horizon of European postwar politics. In this sense, for example, the wartime federalist vision of Hayek and Robbins...

Mapping the Trade and Environment Nexus: Insights from a New Data Set

Environment and trade are increasingly linked through preferential trade agreements. Despite the encompassing nature of environmental provisions in trade agreements, studies on causes and consequences of the trade and environment linkage are scarce. A main cause hindering research in this area is the lack of data. In this research note, we introduce an original data set (TREND) on environmental provisions found in 630 trade agreements signed between 1947 and 2016—the most comprehensive data set in terms of both variables coded and agreements covered. We illustrate the data set’s usefulness by assessing the question of why countries include environmental provisions in trade agreements. Are trade negotiations opportunities to promote stringent environmental standards? Or are environmental provisions window dressing covering protectionist interests? We find evidence that democracies, countries that face import competition, and countries that care about the environment are more likely to include environmental provisions in trade agreements. The database is of particular relevance for research on international institutional design, policy innovation, regime complexity, policy diffusion, and regime effectiveness.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Veto players and the design of preferential trade agreements

ABSTRACTThe concept of domestic veto players has become a popular explanation for foreign policy rigidity. We argue that veto players can be amenable to new policy initiatives – in our case preferential trade agreements (PTAs) – but then choose to exert a strong influence on their contents. Drawing upon more than a dozen PTA-design variables for an expanded collection of postwar trade agreements, our quantitative tests reveal that veto players systematically shape what is included in, and excluded from, PTAs. Most notably, agreements concluded under greater veto-player constraints contain fewer liberalization commitments, weaker dispute settlement, and more opt-outs in the form of trade remedies. Our findings highlight domestic political actors as important determinants of international institutional design and show that veto players exert additional, and perhaps stronger, influence on what is proscribed in agreements, not just whether they are enacted in the first place.

Form over function in finance: international institutional design by bricolage

ABSTRACTDominant perspectives in International Relations start from the assumption that the problem-constellation determines international institutional design. Given the difficulty these ends-oriented approaches face when explaining institutional inefficiencies and pathologies, this article develops an alternate perspective based on anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's concept of bricolage. Design by bricolage starts from the premise that actors are means-focused, seeking to recombine and redeploy tools from their existing environment. Designers constantly experiment, adapting institutional elements from cognate fields, with the aim of creating novel institutional arrangements. The outcomes of international cooperation are a function of the design process, more than the initial problem type. To illustrate the usefulness of this perspective, the paper examines the evolution of the International Financial Architecture, with a focus on the evolution of the international securities regime. A design by bricolage perspective is well positioned to make sense of enduring International Relations puzzles such as why second-best solutions often persist yet later succeed, and, importantly, re-opens the conversation on agency in international institutional design that has been downplayed by conventional, structural approaches. The design of international institutional elements is frequently experimental where form trumps function.

The domestic battle over the design of non-trade issues in preferential trade agreements

ABSTRACTHuman rights, labour standards, and environmental protection standards are commonly linked to trade. Because these links come in different forms, the question arises: what accounts for such variation? An examination of the wide variety of non-trade issues (NTIs) in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) reveals that prominent explanations fall short of explaining this variation. I argue that domestic characteristics of trade partner countries trigger lobbying by interest groups and cause design changes. I hypothesize that strong import and wage pressure increases lobbying by social and environmental protection advocates. A large difference between member states regarding civil and political rights protection levels should trigger NGO activity, but only if at least one member complies at a very high level already. In order to test the argument, I rely on a novel dataset including newly coded data on NTIs design for 474 PTAs signed between 1990 and January 2016. The findings using multivariate regression analysis show that linking trade and social or environmental clauses is motivated by strategic and the inclusion of political rights by substantial interests. This study contributes to the literature on rational design of international institutions, legalization, and issue-linkage.

The Diffusion of Institutional Design Among Regional Organizations

Why are there clones of the European Union (EU) in Africa and the Caribbean, i.e. regional organizations that are very similar to the institutional design of the EU? Why do regional organizations (RO) in general develop similar goals such as common markets or mechanisms of intervention within and across regions? Are such similarities the outcome of random co-evolution, functional adaptation, or are they the outcome of outside coercion? Questioning the standard explanations for the design of international institutions, the Comparative Regional Organizations Project (CROP) investigates the extent to which institutional designs are determined by processes of diffusion between regional organizations. This is motivated by two observations: First, a number of regional organizations are quite similar in their institutional design. Second, the emergence of regional organizations occurs in waves. Over the last five decades, states have decided at specific points in time to either establish regional organizations or to amend them. Both observations indicate that regional organizations and their member states take their decisions in dependence on the decisions of other regional organizations the similarity might be a consequence of diffusion. The project has begun to systematically survey the characteristics and content of the founding and/or amending documents of more than 100 regional organizations, and developed an index of similarity between texts, and therefore institutions. The paper presents CROPs methodological approach and first substantive insights, such as a quantitative evaluation of the argument that some regional organizations develop a model character for other regional organizations.

Why do some international institutions contain strong dispute settlement provisions? New evidence from preferential trade agreements

To understand why some international institutions have stronger dispute settlement mechanisms (DSMs) than others, we investigate the dispute settlement provisions of nearly 600 preferential trade agreements (PTAs), which possess several desirable case-selection features and are evoked more than is realized. We broaden the study of dispute settlement design beyond “legalization” and instead reorient theorizing around a multi-faceted conceptualization of the strength of DSMs. We posit that strong DSMs are first and foremost a rational response to features of agreements that require stronger dispute settlement, such as depth and large memberships. Multivariate empirical tests using a new data set on PTA design confirm these expectations and reveal that depth – the amount of policy change specified in an agreement – is the most powerful and consistent predictor of DSM strength, providing empirical support to a long-posited but controversial conjecture. Yet power also plays a sizeable role, since agreements among asymmetric members are more likely to have strong DSMs due to their mutual appeal, as are those involving the United States. Important regional differences also emerge, as PTAs across the Americas are designed with strong dispute settlement, as are Asian PTAs, which contradicts the conventional wisdom about Asian values and legalization. Our findings demonstrate that rationalism explains much of international institutional design, yet it can be enhanced by also incorporating power-based and regional explanations.