TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sommerer, Thomas
A1  - Squatrito, Theresa
A1  - Tallberg, Jonas
A1  - Lundgren, Magnus
T1  - Decision-making in international organizations
BT  - institutional design and performance
JF  - The review of international organizations
N2  - 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.
KW  - international organizations
KW  - institutional design
KW  - decision-making
KW  - global governance
KW  - performance
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-021-09445-x
SN  - 1559-7431
SN  - 1559-744X
VL  - 17
IS  - 4
SP  - 815
EP  - 845
PB  - Springer
CY  - Boston
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ganghof, Steffen
T1  - Equality-based comparison how to justify democratic institutions in the Real World
JF  - Politics
N2  - Political scientists regularly justify particular democratic institutions. This article explores two desiderata for such justifications. The first is a formal equality baseline which puts the burden of justification on those who favour more unequal institutions. This baseline is seen as an implication of the rule of law. The second desideratum, the comparison requirement, builds on the first: adequate justifications of particular institutions must compare them to the best alternative, and this comparison must consider the costs for political equality. The two desiderata are applied to political science debates about the proportionality of the electoral system and bicameral systems of legislative decision-making.
KW  - electoral systems
KW  - second chambers
KW  - political equality
KW  - institutional design
KW  - public justification
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9256.12002
SN  - 0263-3957
VL  - 33
IS  - 2
SP  - 101
EP  - 111
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ganghof, Steffen
T1  - Justifying types of representative democracy
BT  - a response
JF  - Critical review of international social and political philosophy
N2  - This article responds to critical reflections on my Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism by Sarah Birch, Kevin J. Elliott, Claudia Landwehr and James L. Wilson. It discusses how different types of representative democracy, especially different forms of government (presidential, parliamentary or hybrid), can be justified. It clarifies, among other things, the distinction between procedural and process equality, the strengths of semi-parliamentary government, the potential instability of constitutional designs, and the difference that theories can make in actual processes of constitutional reform.
KW  - political equality
KW  - semi-parliamentarism
KW  - presidentialism
KW  - institutional design
KW  - executive personalism
Y1  - 2023
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2022.2159665
SN  - 1369-8230
SN  - 1743-8772
SP  - 1
EP  - 12
PB  - Routledge
CY  - London
ER  -