@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{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}
}
@article{LundgrenTallbergSommereretal.2023,
  author    = {Lundgren, Magnus and Tallberg, Jonas and Sommerer, Thomas and Squatrito, Theresa},
  title     = {When are international organizations responsive to policy problems?},
  series = {International studies quarterly : the journal of the International Studies Association},
  volume    = {67},
  journal   = {International studies quarterly : the journal of the International Studies Association},
  number    = {3},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press},
  address   = {Oxford},
  issn      = {0020-8833},
  doi       = {10.1093/isq/sqad045},
  pages     = {14},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {When are international organizations (IOs) responsive to the policy problems that motivated their establishment? While it is a conventional assumption that IOs exist to address transnational challenges, the question of whether and when IO policy-making is responsive to shifts in underlying problems has not been systematically explored. This study investigates the responsiveness of IOs from a large-n, comparative approach. Theoretically, we develop three alternative models of IO responsiveness, emphasizing severeness, dependence, and power differentials. Empirically, we focus on the domain of security, examining the responsiveness of eight multi-issue IOs to armed conflict between 1980 and 2015, using a novel and expansive dataset on IO policy decisions. Our findings suggest, first, that IOs are responsive to security problems and, second, that responsiveness is not primarily driven by dependence or power differentials but by problem severity. An in-depth study of the responsiveness of the UN Security Council using more granular data confirms these findings. As the first comparative study of whether and when IO policy adapts to problem severity, the article has implications for debates about IO responsiveness, performance, and legitimacy.},
  language  = {en}
}