TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lundgren, Magnus
A1  - Squatrito, Theresa
A1  - Sommerer, Thomas
A1  - Tallberg, Jonas
T1  - Introducing the Intergovernmental Policy Output Dataset (IPOD)
JF  - The review of international organizations
N2  - 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.
KW  - international organizations
KW  - policy
KW  - policy agendas
KW  - decision-making
Y1  - 2023
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-023-09492-6
SN  - 1559-7431
SN  - 1559-744X
VL  - 19
SP  - 117
EP  - 146
PB  - Springer
CY  - Boston
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lundgren, Magnus
A1  - Tallberg, Jonas
A1  - Sommerer, Thomas
A1  - Squatrito, Theresa
T1  - When are international organizations responsive to policy problems?
JF  - International studies quarterly : the journal of the International Studies Association
N2  - 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.
Y1  - 2023
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqad045
SN  - 0020-8833
SN  - 1468-2478
VL  - 67
IS  - 3
PB  - Oxford University Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  -