@article{SommererSquatritoTallbergetal.2021, author = {Sommerer, Thomas and Squatrito, Theresa and Tallberg, Jonas and Lundgren, Magnus}, title = {Decision-making in international organizations}, series = {The review of international organizations}, volume = {17}, journal = {The review of international organizations}, number = {4}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {Boston}, issn = {1559-7431}, doi = {10.1007/s11558-021-09445-x}, pages = {815 -- 845}, year = {2021}, abstract = {International organizations (IOs) experience significant variation in their decision-making performance, or the extent to which they produce policy output. While some IOs are efficient decision-making machineries, others are plagued by deadlock. How can such variation be explained? Examining this question, the article makes three central contributions. First, we approach performance by looking at IO decision-making in terms of policy output and introduce an original measure of decision-making performance that captures annual growth rates in IO output. Second, we offer a novel theoretical explanation for decision-making performance. This account highlights the role of institutional design, pointing to how majoritarian decision rules, delegation of authority to supranational institutions, and access for transnational actors (TNAs) interact to affect decision-making. Third, we offer the first comparative assessment of the decision-making performance of IOs. While previous literature addresses single IOs, we explore decision-making across a broad spectrum of 30 IOs from 1980 to 2011. Our analysis indicates that IO decision-making performance varies across and within IOs. We find broad support for our theoretical account, showing the combined effect of institutional design features in shaping decision-making performance. Notably, TNA access has a positive effect on decision-making performance when pooling is greater, and delegation has a positive effect when TNA access is higher. We also find that pooling has an independent, positive effect on decision-making performance. All-in-all, these findings suggest that the institutional design of IOs matters for their decision-making performance, primarily in more complex ways than expected in earlier research.}, language = {en} } @article{DoerflerHeinzel2022, author = {D{\"o}rfler, Thomas and Heinzel, Mirko Noa}, title = {Greening global governance}, series = {The review of international organizations}, volume = {18}, journal = {The review of international organizations}, number = {1}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {Boston}, issn = {1559-7431}, doi = {10.1007/s11558-022-09462-4}, pages = {117 -- 143}, year = {2022}, abstract = {The last decades have seen a remarkable expansion in the number of International Organizations (IOs) that have mainstreamed environmental issues into their policy scope—in many cases due to the pressure of civil society. We hypothesize that International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs), whose headquarters are in proximity to the headquarters of IOs, are more likely to affect IOs' expansion into the environmental domain. We test this explanation by utilizing a novel dataset on the strength of environmental global civil society in proximity to the headquarters of 76 IOs between 1950 and 2017. Three findings stand out. First, the more environmental INGOs have their secretariat in proximity to the headquarter of an IO, the more likely the IO mainstreams environmental policy. Second, proximate INGOs' contribution increases when they can rely on domestically focused NGOs in member states. Third, a pathway case reveals that proximate INGOs played an essential role in inside lobbying, outside lobbying and information provision during the campaign to mainstream environmental issues at the World Bank. However, their efforts relied to a substantial extent on the work of local NGOs on the ground.}, language = {en} } @article{LundgrenSquatritoSommereretal.2023, author = {Lundgren, Magnus and Squatrito, Theresa and Sommerer, Thomas and Tallberg, Jonas}, title = {Introducing the Intergovernmental Policy Output Dataset (IPOD)}, series = {The review of international organizations}, volume = {19}, journal = {The review of international organizations}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {Boston}, issn = {1559-7431}, doi = {10.1007/s11558-023-09492-6}, pages = {117 -- 146}, year = {2023}, abstract = {There is a growing recognition that international organizations (IOs) formulate and adopt policy in a wide range of areas. IOs have emerged as key venues for states seeking joint solutions to contemporary challenges such as climate change or COVID-19, and to establish frameworks to bolster trade, development, security, and more. In this capacity, IOs produce both extraordinary and routine policy output with a multitude of purposes, ranging from policies of historic significance like admitting new members to the more mundane tasks of administering IO staff. This article introduces the Intergovernmental Policy Output Dataset (IPOD), which covers close to 37,000 individual policy acts of 13 multi-issue IOs in the 1980-2015 period. The dataset fills a gap in the growing body of literature on the comparative study of IOs, providing researchers with a fine-grained perspective on the structure of IO policy output and data for comparisons across time, policy areas, and organizations. This article describes the construction and coverage of the dataset and identifies key temporal and cross-sectional patterns revealed by the data. In a concise illustration of the dataset's utility, we apply models of punctuated equilibria in a comparative study of the relationship between institutional features and broad policy agenda dynamics. Overall, the Intergovernmental Policy Output Dataset offers a unique resource for researchers to analyze IO policy output in a granular manner and to explore questions of responsiveness, performance, and legitimacy of IOs.}, language = {en} }