Intergovernmental Organizations Membership Research Articles

Interests convergence in global human rights politics

Abstract What explains the convergence and divergence of states’ interests related to global human rights? This study examines the dyadic similarity of the language used in the multilateral dialogue focusing on the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). The joint activities of NGOs influence states, and human rights norms are transmitted through IGOs. Using text analysis methods, the similarity between state recommendations during the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is systematically quantified. Analyses suggest that a pair of states are more likely to use similar language in UPR recommendations as the number of joint activities of NGOs, shared memberships in IGOs, and shared experience in the UNHRC increases. The effects are robust even after controlling for different types of political relationships between states.

Stratification gone awry: system rigidity, agency restraint and tiered membership in intergovernmental organizations

Stratification gone awry: system rigidity, agency restraint and tiered membership in intergovernmental organizations

Choosing tactics: The efficacy of violence and nonviolence in self-determination disputes

Disputes over self-determination (SD) have led to many civil wars, and a primary alternative, nonviolent campaign, is rarely successful in this context. Yet, while secession is rare, these movements often achieve more limited successes in the form of concessions from the state. This article provides a new assessment of the efficacy of different tactics – violent, nonviolent and conventional political action. It advances an argument that nonviolent tactics can help SD movements to generate indirect pressure on states that contributes to movement success, including greater autonomy. Nonviolence is used to garner attention from international actors using a human rights frame for their cause. International actors that are receptive to these human rights narratives then incentivize concessions for the SD movements and dis-incentivize repression. This happens through a variety of means, such as public shaming of the host state and withholding inter-governmental organization membership. Statistical analysis of violent and nonviolent tactics in SD movements shows that nonviolence can be effective in successfully obtaining concessions. Movements that use nonviolence are twice as likely to see concessions in any given year compared to those that just make demands but do not use nonviolence or violence. The effect of nonviolence is slightly larger than that of violence, which is also associated an increased chance of concession.

Instrumental or intrinsic? Human rights alignment in intergovernmental organizations

Why do states’ human rights records converge with co-members in intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)? This study provides new insights on whether interactions in IGOs have the capacity to genuinely transform state preferences or whether norm diffusion is a consequence of instrumental processes. We leverage information about the timing of human rights alignment to disentangle intrinsic from instrumental motives. We hypothesize that instrumental motives find expression in pre-membership alignment and reversions to original normative standards after IGO exits. Intrinsic motives lead to gradual alignment during IGO membership and result in stable normative changes beyond IGO exits. Using varying-slopes, varying intercepts models, we investigate the distance on human rights indices between individual states and IGO means. While we find evidence for systematic convergence during IGO membership, no significant changes occur before and after IGO membership. Testing alignment of different physical integrity rights, we find no evidence for instrumental shifts to clandestine repression during IGO membership. Overall, the results suggest that norm alignment in IGOs is at least not exclusively instrumentally motivated. Our findings support constructivist arguments on state interests and suggest that IGOs are capable of transforming states’ human rights related preferences.

Tracking organizations in the world: The Correlates of War IGO Version 3.0 datasets

This article summarizes the Correlates of War Intergovernmental Organizations (IGO) Version 3.0 datasets. The new datasets include information about the population of IGOs in the international system and state participation in those formal international institutions from 1816 to 2014. Consistent with Versions 2.0 and 2.3, Version 3.0 of the IGO data comes in three forms: country-year, IGO-year, and joint dyadic membership. This article briefly describes the data collection process and identifies important changes to the dataset before moving to analyze fundamental patterns in the data. Most notable among the changes from earlier versions of the data is the inclusion of annual membership data for the 1815–1964 time period. In addition, we present information about the overall trends in the institutionalization of cooperation at both the global and regional levels, with the latter focusing on the interesting membership dynamics in Asia and Africa. We then track and discuss patterns in state memberships and examine how these changes manifest in the dyadic data. The article concludes with a discussion of how the COW IGO 3.0 data compare to other prominent datasets on state participation in international institutions and highlights some new areas of research that will benefit from the release of the updated IGO membership dataset.

Between the local and the global: diffusion of intergovernmental organization membership among Korean local governments

ABSTRACTThis article examines Korean local governments’ joining intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). In the international regime, nation-states have been regarded as the most basic unit that possesses sovereignty. In the past decades, however, substate and non-state actors have progressively gained more autonomy and legitimacy to engage in international activities, and Korean local governments have begun to affiliate themselves with various IGOs. I argue that Korean local governments join IGOs so as not to lag behind, even when they are not fully capable to join ‘glocalization,’ a combined force of localism and globalization. Event history analysis shows empirical support for this claim. A local government’s IGO memberships are likely to increase when other local governments join IGOs, especially when its peers/neighbors increasingly pursue inward and outward internationalization. Local pressures coming from peers/neighbors shape local governments’ responses to globalization. By investigating determinants of IGO memberships, this study sheds light upon motivational factors for local governments to adapt to a globalizing society.

VARIETIES OF INTERGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION MEMBERSHIPS AND STRUCTURAL EFFECTS IN THE WORLD TRADE NETWORK

To what extent does joint membership in intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) matter for bilateral trade? How and under what conditions do the various types of IGOs — economic, socio-cultural and general purpose — influence bilateral trade between their members? How do complex interdependencies in world trade matter? Existing research tends to examine aggregate joint IGO memberships and has done little to analyze how specific types of IGO membership matter in trade. Using a detailed IGO dataset and a novel network analysis approach called the temporal exponential random graph model, I assess the importance of three main IGO types — economic, socio-cultural and general purpose — in helping members to establish major trading ties. The results provide support for general purpose and socio-cultural IGOs and point to the importance of network phenomena such as popularity, activity and transitivity effects. Moreover, joint economic IGO memberships exhibit slightly more complex relations with bilateral trade. A robustness test reveals that preferential trade agreements are significant in fostering trade, while the World Trade Organization and other economic IGOs such as development banks are not. This paper presents a nuanced way of analyzing IGOs and provides the impetus for the study of complex interdependencies in international trade.

The networked peace

Existing work has shown that membership in intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) can, among other outcomes, reduce conflict, promote democratization, and shape crisis bargaining. The traditional approach to studying how IGOs can reduce conflict has focused on the effects of dyads’ direct ties to IGOs. In doing so, these analyses use fairly simple counts of the number of IGOs to which the states in each dyad share membership. We argue that this approach is too narrow; we instead consider the effects of higher-order groupings within the IGO network, which we call IGO clusters. Within these IGO clusters, states share relatively many IGO connections with each other, both directly and through indirect links through third parties, fourth parties, and so on. The effects of indirect IGO ties are especially important within such structures. We use a modularity maximization approach to detect clusters within the IGO network. We find robust empirical support for our hypothesis that the pacifying effect of IGO membership stems from the extent to which pairs of states are more deeply embedded within the wider IGO network. Indeed, we find that once we account for states’ shared membership in clusters of IGOs, the simpler dyadic measure of shared IGO membership no longer shows evidence of a conflict-inhibiting effect.

Hard International Law-Contributing Organizations as Networks

Abstract This paper explores the networks that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) create in the international system and explore how states relate to each other in such networks. It focuses in particular on the network of IGOs that act as creators of and agents for hard international law. We introduce new data that allows us to investigate which institutional traits and functions are most closely related to IGOs’ contribution to the implementation and enforcement of informal international law. We map out and explore the network of “highly legalized” IGOs for the years 1980–2005 as well as the affiliation networks emerging from states’ membership in such IGOs. Combining international relations theory with network theory, we raise novel hypotheses on the potential impact of highly legalized IGO networks on states’ conflict behavior and peace.

World Polity Matters

Did the nation-state spread due to global diffusion? Wimmer and Feinstein’s 2010 ASR article concludes that there are no “world polity” influences on the rise of the nation-state; rather, the spread of the nation-state was driven by proximate and contextual political factors situated at the local and regional levels, in line with historical institutionalist arguments. Here, after arguing that Wimmer and Feinstein misspecify the historical domain of the world polity theory, we reanalyze their data and find that world polity has played a consistent role in the global rise of the nation-state since WWII. Specifically, global diffusion processes complement the more local and regional varieties of causal processes stressed by historical institutionalist theorists. We measure the institutionalization of world polity with inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and processes through which potential nation-states mimic existing nation-states. IGO membership and existing nation-states show positive significance in the post-1945 period, and all three measures significantly facilitate nation-state creation for 1953 to 2001, the period for which INGO data are available. Results affirm the importance of state legitimacy secured by adapting the global model of the nation-state.

Do Donors Punish Countries with Restrictive NGO Laws?: A Panel Study, 1993-2009

Foreign aid contributes to about 10% of gross domestic product of developing countries. To deliver aid in recipient countries, western donors increasingly rely on non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Yet, since the mid-1990s, 39 developing countries have adopted laws restricting the inflow of foreign aid to NGOs operating in their jurisdictions. Have donors punished these recipient countries by withholding aid? In this paper, we offer an empirical test of the “NGO crackdown-foreign aid” link by examining a panel of 134 aid-receiving countries for the years 1993-2012. Our empirical analyses suggest that all else equal, the adoption of a restrictive NGO finance law is associated with 15% to 57% decline in foreign aid inflows (depending on the model specification) in years subsequent to the enactment of these restrictive laws. Our finding holds even after we control for a number of alternative explanations for foreign aid flows, including poverty levels, regime type, conflict, common language, freedom of the press and other basic civil liberties, trade, religion, and memberships in intergovernmental organizations. In sum, donors are punishing countries that have enacted restrictive NGOs laws with reduced aid flows.

The Spatial Dimensions of State Fiscal Capacity The Mechanisms of International Influence on Domestic Extractive Efforts

This paper expands traditional predatory theory approaches to state fiscal capacity by adopting spatial analytical reasoning and methods. Although previous work in the predatory theory tradition has often incorporated interdependent external influences, such as war and trade, it has often done so in a way that maintains a theoretical and empirical autonomy of the state. Theoretically, we suggest four mechanisms (coercion, competition, learning, and emulation) that operate to channel information through interstate rivalry and territorial contiguity, trade networks, and the political space associated with regime type and intergovernmental organization membership. We test our predictions using a multi-parametric spatio-temporal autoregressive model with four spatial lags capturing the four mechanisms. Our empirical results provide support for the coercion and learning mechanisms.

Screening Out Risk: IGOs, Member State Selection, and Interstate Conflict, 1951-2000

Do intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) screen out conflict-prone states? We argue that IGOs have incentives to guard against admitting new members that pose significant security risks. Using a data set based on state–IGO pairings, we find clear evidence of screening: As security risk increases, the probability of IGO membership declines. Our findings underscore the importance of accounting for possible selection bias when studying the effects of IGO membership on conflict. Indeed, the types of IGOs sometimes found to be most effective at promoting peace—namely highly institutionalized organizations and those with a security mandate—also prove particularly selective and sensitive to risk.

Neo-Kantianism and Coercive Diplomacy: The Complex Case of Economic Sanctions

Although voluminous research connects the neo-Kantian triad—democracy, economic interdependence, and intergovernmental organization membership—to amelioration of conflict processes, comparatively little is known about how these factors relate to economic coercion. We advance the relevant literature on neo-Kantianism and the determinants of sanction decisions by (1) analyzing the impact of all three neo-Kantian factors on economic coercion and (2) assessing the effects of these factors across both the onset of threat and imposition of sanctions. Results from the time-series, cross-national data analyses indicate a significant but complex connection between the neo-Kantian variables and sanctions. Specifically, we find that although democratic regimes are less likely to threaten each other with sanctions, once a threat is made, democracies are more likely to impose sanctions against each other. Economic interdependence and common IGO membership are likely to increase the probability of sanction threats. Yet, the results also suggest that common IGO membership decreases the probability of sanction imposition while economic interdependence has no statistically significant effect on the decision to impose sanctions. Overall, these results highlight the importance of a more nuanced study of sanction decisions for a better understanding of the factors that lead to sanction use.

IGO membership, network convergence, and credible signaling in militarized disputes

Existing studies of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and militarized conflict focus on dyadic counts of shared IGO membership. However, dyadic approaches are inconsistent with the basic properties of IGOs. Because IGOs are multilateral organizations, shared membership necessarily involves ties to third parties. This article employs network analytics to develop a novel explanation of how third-party IGO ties reduce militarized conflict. The analysis first examines the ‘structural similarity’ of states, defined by the extent to which states share similar patterns of IGO membership with relevant third parties. High levels of structural similarity indicate that states interact with a common set of IGO collaborators. The analysis then shows that micro-level changes in IGO membership effect changes in structural similarity, leading to the macro-level phenomenon of ‘network convergence,’ wherein states increasingly collaborate with the same third parties over time. Substantively, convergence results in increased overlap and integration between states’ respective local networks of IGO partners. Because network convergence is costly, involving a combination of IGO-based accession, sovereignty, and alignment costs, it is unlikely to be pursued by purely exploitative state types. Consequently, convergence provides cooperative types with a mechanism for signaling a preference for cooperation over conflict. These credible signals in turn establish mutual trust among cooperators and effectively reduce the risk of militarized conflict. Extensive empirical analysis shows that, in fact, network convergence strongly correlates with a decline in militarized dispute initiations. The more that states collaborate with one another’s IGO partners, the less likely they are to fight.

Spanning the Institutional Abyss: The Intergovernmental Network and the Governance of Foreign Direct Investment

Global economic transactions such as foreign direct investment (FDI) must extend over an institutional abyss between the jurisdiction, and therefore protection, of the states involved. Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) represent an important attempt to span this abyss. The authors use a network approach to demonstrate that the connections between two countries, through joint membership in the same IGOs, are associated with a large positive influence on the FDI that flows between them. Moreover, they show that this effect occurs not only in the case of connections through economic IGOs but also through those with social and cultural mandates. This demonstrates that relational governance is important and feasible in the global context, even for the most risky transactions. The authors also examine the interdependence between the IGO network and the domestic institutions of states. Social and cultural IGO connections do more and economic IGO connections less to increase FDI when the target country is more democratic.

The Quest for the Liberal Peace: Toward a Measure of Interstate Cooperation

Building on the Kantian tripod of peace in liberal peace theory, we test theories of state intergovernmental organization (IGO) membership and levels of state cooperation. We examine the measurement for IGO joint membership and find that it is inadequate to measure the level of cooperation among states. Using network analysis, we propose a new dyadic measure for the level of bilateral cooperation. We argue that states craft intergovernmental agreements, purposely nested within bilateral treaty networks, to further consolidate and bolster such agreements’ efficacy. States both express and safeguard their power interests via negotiated treaties, and while costs of violating individual treaties are small, violating treaties nested within broader treaty networks are more costly as this significantly inhibits future cooperation with all states in a region. By creating networks of treaties, states bolster compliance, enhance the prospects for cooperative foreign policy behavior, and strengthen the conditions for peace. We argue that the strength of a bilateral treaty network is a better measure than joint IGO membership for liberal peace theory. We test this measure in the post-Soviet space, where many scholars expect dyadic conflict due to Russia’s regional economic and military dominance. Using militarized interstate disputes (MID’s) as the dependent variable in our model, we find that dyads that have stronger treaty networks are significantly less likely to experience a MID than dyads without a strong treaty network. We propose that the strength of treaty networks is a better measure for tapping cooperation among states, yielding analytical results more compatible with liberal peace theory.

Helpful Organizations: Membership in Inter-Governmental Organizations and Environmental Quality in Developing Countries

Does membership in intergovernmental organizations help developing countries enhance their environmental performance? This article argues that IGO membership can improve the environmental performance of developing countries, by linking different issues, promoting the general idea of environmental sustainability and providing a channel through which these countries receive technologies and resources necessary to reduce pollution. This argument has been tested on panel data for 114 developing countries in 1970–2000. The results confirm that, controlling for a country's income and its political system, IGO membership is indeed associated with a reduction in both air pollution and greenhouse gases. To understand the mechanisms behind this result better, IGO membership is disaggregated according to both function and the degree of institutionalization of the respective organization.

Who Is Punished? Regional Intergovernmental Organizations and the Enforcement of Democratic Norms

AbstractScholars have found an association between membership in regional intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and democracy, and IGO enforcement is often credited as an important factor explaining this link. But empirical evidence reveals great variation in whether these organizations actually respond to violations of democratic norms, even in democratic regions. Why do IGOs punish some norm-violating countries but not others? What does this variation imply for theories about how IGO membership helps states make credible commitments? This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding variation in multilateral norm enforcement. It identifies two obstacles to enforcement—the presence of competing geopolitical interests and uncertainty about the nature and scope of norm violations—and it argues that international monitoring can help mitigate these obstacles by revealing and publicizing information that pressures reluctant member states to support enforcement. An original data set of democracy enforcement in Latin America and postcommunist countries is used to examine regional IGO enforcement in response to one prevalent type of democratic norm violation: electoral misconduct. I find that enforcement is less likely in countries of high geopolitical importance, but the presence of election observers increases the probability of enforcement, and the content of observers' reports influences the type of enforcement that is imposed. These findings suggest that the link between IGO membership, credible commitments, and democracy should be theorized and tested as a conditional relationship, depending on country- and incident-specific factors that influence the likelihood of enforcement.

The Company You Keep: International Socialization and the Diffusion of Human Rights Norms

Does membership in Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) affect states’ human rights behavior? One might expect IGOs with a specific human rights mandate, like the International Labour Organization or the Council of Europe, to have a positive effect on the human rights practices of their member states. But what about other sorts of IGOs, particularly those with no direct connection to human rights issues? This study employs cross-national data on abuses of “physical integrity rights” for 137 countries over the period 1982–2000 to test the hypothesis that IGOs can promote the diffusion of human rights norms by providing venues for interstate socialization. Recent empirical work on IGOs has suggested that this sort of socialization effect can play an important role in promoting democracy and can also lead to a more general convergence among states’ interests. The results presented here suggest that IGOs can have a surprisingly powerful influence on states’ human rights practices as a result of this process.