TY - JOUR
A1 - Busch, Per-Olof
A1 - Feil, Hauke
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
A1 - Herold, Jana
A1 - Kempken, Mathies
A1 - Liese, Andrea
T1 - Policy recommendations of international bureaucracies
BT - the importance of country-specificity
JF - International review of administrative sciences : an international journal of comparative public administration
N2 - Many international bureaucracies give policy advice to national administrative units. Why is the advice given by some international bureaucracies more influential than the recommendations of others? We argue that targeting advice to member states through national embeddedness and country-tailored research increases the influence of policy advice. Subsequently, we test how these characteristics shape the relative influence of 15 international bureaucracies' advice in four financial policy areas through a global survey of national administrations from more than 80 countries. Our findings support arguments that global blueprints need to be adapted and translated to become meaningful for country-level work.
Points for practitioners
National administrations are advised by an increasing number of international bureaucracies, and they cannot listen to all of this advice. Whereas some international bureaucracies give 'one-size-fits-all' recommendations to rather diverse countries, others cater their recommendations to the national audience. Investigating financial policy recommendations, we find that national embeddedness and country-tailored advice render international bureaucracies more influential.
KW - financial policy
KW - international administration
KW - international
KW - organizations
KW - multi-level government
KW - regime complexity
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/00208523211013385
SN - 0020-8523
SN - 1461-7226
VL - 87
IS - 4
SP - 775
EP - 793
PB - Sage Publ.
CY - Los Angeles, Calif.
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
T1 - International bureaucrats and organizational performance
BT - Country-Specific knowledge and sectoral knowledge in world bank projects
JF - International Studies Quarterly
N2 - International organizations (IOs) try to incorporate policy-specific best practices and country-specific knowledge to increase well-informed decision-making. However, the relative contribution of the two kinds of knowledge to organizational performance is insufficiently understood. The article addresses this gap by focusing on the role of staff in World Bank performance. It posits that country-specific knowledge, sectoral knowledge, and their combination positively contribute to World Bank projects. The argument is tested drawing on a novel database on the tenure, nationality, and educational background of World Bank Task Team Leaders. Three findings stand out. First, country-specific knowledge seems to matter on average, while sectoral knowledge does not. Second, there is some evidence that staff that combine both kinds of knowledge are empowered to make more positive contributions to performance. Third, the diversity and relevance of experience, not length of tenure, are associated with more success. The findings contribute to discussions on international bureaucracies by highlighting how differences between the knowledge of individual staff shape their decision-making and performance. IOs could better tap into the existing resources in their bureaucracies to enhance their performance by rotating staff less frequently between duty stations.
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqac013
SN - 0020-8833
SN - 1468-2478
VL - 66
IS - 2
PB - Oxford University Press
CY - Oxford
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
A1 - Liese, Andrea
T1 - Expert authority and support for COVID-19 measures in Germany and the UK
BT - a survey experiment
JF - West European politics
N2 - During COVID-19, various public institutions tried to shape citizens’ behaviour to slow the spread of the pandemic. How did their authority affect citizens’ support of public measures taken to combat the spread of COVID-19? The article makes two contributions. First, it presents a novel conceptualisation of authority as a source heuristic. Second, it analyses the authority of four types of public institutions (health ministries, universities, public health agencies, the WHO) in two countries (Germany and the UK), drawing on novel data from a survey experiment conducted in May 2020. On average, institutional endorsements seem to have mattered little. However, there is an observable polarisation effect where citizens who ascribe much expertise to public institutions support COVID-19 measures more than the control group. Furthermore, those who ascribe little expertise support them less than the control group. Finally, neither perception of biases nor exposure to institutions in public debates seems consistently to affect their authority.
KW - COVID-19
KW - expertise
KW - authority
KW - survey experiment
KW - institutions
KW - crises
KW - governance
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1873630
SN - 0140-2382
SN - 1743-9655
SP - 1258
EP - 1282
PB - Taylor & Francis
CY - Abingdon
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
T1 - Mediating power?
BT - Delegation, pooling and leadership selection at international organisations
JF - The British journal of politics & international relations : BJPIR
N2 - The selection of the executive heads of international organisations represents a key decision in the politics of international organisations. However, we know little about what dynamics influence this selection. The article focuses on the nationality of selected executive heads. It argues that institutional design impacts the factors that influence leadership selection by shaping the costs and benefits of attaining the position for member states’ nationals. The argument is tested with novel data on the nationality of individuals in charge of 69 international organisation bureaucracies between 1970 and 2017. Two findings stand out: first, powerful countries are more able to secure positions in international organisations in which executive heads are voted in by majority voting. Second, less consistent evidence implies that powerful countries secure more positions when bureaucracies are authoritative. The findings have implications for debates on international cooperation by illustrating how power and institutions interact in the selection of international organisation executive heads.
KW - decision-making
KW - delegation
KW - executive head
KW - institutional design
KW - international organisations
KW - pooling
KW - selection
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148121992761
SN - 1467-856X
SN - 1369-1481
VL - 24
IS - 1
SP - 153
EP - 170
PB - Sage
CY - London
ER -
TY - THES
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
T1 - World Bank staff and project implementation
BT - the importance of country-specific knowledge
Y1 - 2021
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Busch, Per-Olof
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
A1 - Kempken, Mathies
A1 - Liese, Andrea
T1 - Mind the gap?
BT - comparing de facto and de jure expert authority of international public administrations in financial and agricultural policy
JF - Journal of comparative policy analysis : research and practice
N2 - Many authors have argued that International Public Administration can influence policy-making through their expert authority. The article compares de jure and de facto expert authority of IPAs to evaluate their conformity. It comparatively assesses the two kinds of authority for five important IPAs (BIS, FAO, IMF, OECD and World Bank) active in agriculture or financial policy. It shows that, on average, de jure and de facto authority seem to conform. At the same time, it demonstrates that gaps between de jure and de facto authority exist at the level of the IPAs, the policy areas and the IPAs’ addressees
KW - international public administration
KW - comparative
KW - expert authority
KW - de jure authority
KW - de facto authority
KW - international organisations
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13876988.2020.1820866
SN - 1387-6988
SN - 1572-5448
VL - 24
IS - 3
SP - 230
EP - 253
PB - Taylor & Francis
CY - London
ER -
TY - GEN
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
A1 - Richter, Jonas
A1 - Busch, Per-Olof
A1 - Feil, Hauke
A1 - Herold, Jana
A1 - Liese, Andrea Margit
T1 - Birds of a feather?
BT - the determinants of impartiality perceptions of the IMF and the World Bank
T2 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2 - The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank ascribe to impartiality in their mandates. At the same time, scholarship indicates that their decisions are disproportionately influenced by powerful member states. Impartiality is seen as crucial in determining International Organizations' (IOs) effectiveness and legitimacy in the literature. However, we know little about whether key interlocutors in national governments perceive the International Financial Institutions as biased actors who do the bidding for powerful member states or as impartial executors of policy. In order to better understand these perceptions, we surveyed high-level civil servants who are chiefly responsible for four policy areas from more than 100 countries. We found substantial variations in impartiality perceptions. What explains these variations? By developing an argument of selective awareness, we extend rationalist and ideational perspectives on IO impartiality to explain domestic perceptions. Using novel survey data, we test whether staffing underrepresentation, voting underrepresentation, alignment to the major shareholders and overlapping economic policy paradigms are associated with impartiality perceptions. We find substantial evidence that shared economic policy paradigms influence impartiality perceptions. The findings imply that by diversifying their ideational culture, IOs can increase the likelihood that domestic stakeholders view them as impartial.
T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe - 186
KW - impartiality
KW - bias
KW - International Financial Institutions
KW - International Monetary Fund
KW - World Bank
Y1 - 2020
U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-521690
SN - 1867-5808
IS - 5
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Dörfler, Thomas
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
T1 - Greening global governance
BT - INGO secretariats and environmental mainstreaming of IOs, 1950 to 2017
JF - The review of international organizations
N2 - 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.
KW - international organizations
KW - environmental mainstreaming
KW - international non-governmental organizations
KW - policy scope
KW - geographical proximity
KW - world bank
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-022-09462-4
SN - 1559-7431
SN - 1559-744X
VL - 18
IS - 1
SP - 117
EP - 143
PB - Springer
CY - Boston
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko
A1 - Koenig-Archibugi, Mathias
T1 - Harmful side effects
BT - how government restrictions against transnational civil society affect global health
JF - British journal of political science
N2 - Governments have increasingly adopted laws restricting the activities of international non-governmental organizations INGOs within their borders. Such laws are often intended to curb the ability of critical INGOs to discover and communicate government failures and abuses to domestic and international audiences. They can also have the unintended effect of reducing the presence and activities of INGOs working on health issues, and depriving local health workers and organizations of access to resources, knowledge and other forms of support. This study assesses whether legislative restrictions on INGOs are associated with fewer health INGOs in a wide range of countries and with the ability of those countries to mitigate disability-adjusted life years lost because of twenty-one disease categories between 1993 and 2017. The findings indicate that restrictive legislation hampered efforts by civil society to lighten the global burden of disease and had adverse side effects on the health of citizens worldwide.
KW - international non-governmental organizations
KW - INGOs
KW - restrictions to civil society
KW - closing civic space
KW - authoritarianism
KW - health services
KW - global health
KW - burden of disease
KW - disability-adjusted life years
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123422000564
SN - 0007-1234
SN - 1469-2112
VL - 53
IS - 4
SP - 1293
EP - 1310
PB - Cambridge University Press
CY - Cambridge
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
A1 - Richter, Jonas
A1 - Busch, Per-Olof
A1 - Feil, Hauke
A1 - Herold, Jana
A1 - Liese, Andrea
T1 - Birds of a feather?
BT - the determinants of impartiality perceptions of the IMF and the World Bank
JF - Review of international political economy
N2 - The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank ascribe to impartiality in their mandates. At the same time, scholarship indicates that their decisions are disproportionately influenced by powerful member states. Impartiality is seen as crucial in determining International Organizations' (IOs) effectiveness and legitimacy in the literature. However, we know little about whether key interlocutors in national governments perceive the International Financial Institutions as biased actors who do the bidding for powerful member states or as impartial executors of policy. In order to better understand these perceptions, we surveyed high-level civil servants who are chiefly responsible for four policy areas from more than 100 countries. We found substantial variations in impartiality perceptions. What explains these variations? By developing an argument of selective awareness, we extend rationalist and ideational perspectives on IO impartiality to explain domestic perceptions. Using novel survey data, we test whether staffing underrepresentation, voting underrepresentation, alignment to the major shareholders and overlapping economic policy paradigms are associated with impartiality perceptions. We find substantial evidence that shared economic policy paradigms influence impartiality perceptions. The findings imply that by diversifying their ideational culture, IOs can increase the likelihood that domestic stakeholders view them as impartial.
KW - Impartiality
KW - bias
KW - International Financial Institutions
KW - International
KW - Monetary Fund
KW - World Bank
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1749711
SN - 0969-2290
SN - 1466-4526
VL - 28
IS - 5
SP - 1249
EP - 1273
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Abingdon
ER -
TY - CHAP
A1 - Liese, Andrea
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
ED - Knill, Christoph
ED - Steinebach, Yves
T1 - Reputation and influence
T2 - International public administrations in global public policy
N2 - International public administrations (IPAs) are collective bodies within international organizations (IOs) made up of international civil servants that support the intergovernmental bodies and member states. Over the last decade, research on these bodies has “gained substantial momentum”. Comparative assessments of IPAs reputation among stakeholders are rare. The literature on the sociological legitimacy of IOs is most advanced in this respect. A comparative agenda on IPAs reputation for expertise or neutrality is still in its infancy. Research has shown that different stakeholders view the same IPA quite differently. Reputation is a crucial concept in political science and IR research and has been widely used to predict states’ future behavior, notably regarding cooperation and conflict. IPAs seem to vary substantially in their reputation for expertise among critical interlocutors. In financial policy, several prominent IPAs are seen as experts, including the European Central Bank and the IMF.
Y1 - 2022
SN - 978-1-032-34673-1
SN - 978-1-032-34672-4
SN - 978-1-003-32329-7
U6 - https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003323297-5
SP - 52
EP - 81
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - London
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Forster, Timon
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
T1 - Reacting, fast and slow
BT - how world leaders shaped government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic
JF - Journal of European public policy
N2 - The COVID-19 pandemic created extraordinary challenges for governments to safeguard the well-being of their people. To what extent has leaders' reliance on scientific advice shaped government responses to the COVID-19 outbreak? We argue that leaders who tend to orient themselves on expert advice realized the extent of the crisis earlier. Consequently, these governments would adopt containment measures relatively quickly, despite the high uncertainty they faced. Over time, differences in government responses based on the use of science would dissipate due to herding effects. We test our argument on data combining 163 government responses to the pandemic with national- and individual-level characteristics. Consistent with our argument, we find that countries governed by politicians with a stronger technocratic mentality, approximated by holding a PhD, adopted restrictive containment measures faster in the early, but not in the later, stages of the crisis. This importance of expert-based leadership plausibly extends to other large-scale societal crises.
KW - crisis
KW - leadership
KW - expertise
KW - COVID-19
KW - policy-making
KW - public health
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2021.1942157
SN - 1350-1763
SN - 1466-4429
VL - 28
IS - 8
SP - 1299
EP - 1320
PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY - Abingdon
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Baccini, Leonardo
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko
A1 - Koenig-Archibugi, Mathias
T1 - The social construction of global health priorities
BT - an empirical analysis of contagion in bilateral health aid
JF - International studies quarterly
N2 - Donors of development assistance for health typically provide funding for a range of disease focus areas, such as maternal health and child health, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and other infectious diseases. But funding for each disease category does not match closely its contribution to the disability and loss of life it causes and the cost-effectiveness of interventions. We argue that peer influences in the social construction of global health priorities contribute to explaining this misalignment. Aid policy-makers are embedded in a social environment encompassing other donors, health experts, advocacy groups, and international officials. This social environment influences the conceptual and normative frameworks of decision-makers, which in turn affect their funding priorities. Aid policy-makers are especially likely to emulate decisions on funding priorities taken by peers with whom they are most closely involved in the context of expert and advocacy networks. We draw on novel data on donor connectivity through health IGOs and health INGOs and assess the argument by applying spatial regression models to health aid disbursed globally between 1990 and 2017. The analysis provides strong empirical support for our argument that the involvement in overlapping expert and advocacy networks shapes funding priorities regarding disease categories and recipient countries in health aid.
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqab092
SN - 0020-8833
SN - 1468-2478
VL - 66
IS - 1
PB - Oxford University Press
CY - Oxford
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko
T1 - Divided loyalties?
BT - the role of national IO staff in aid–funded procurement
JF - Governance
N2 - Many operational International Organizations (IOs) rely on national staff when implementing projects in member states. However, fears persist that the loyalties of national IO staff may be divided when working in their home countries. The article studies differences in more than 50,000 procurement decisions taken in 1729 projects overseen by World Bank staff working as expatriates or in their home countries. The empirical results show that when staff work in their home countries, national suppliers' probability of winning procurement contracts increases. However, these increases are not driven by restricted procurement processes—that exclude competition—which are often seen as red flags for corruption. Instead, restricted procurement processes seem to be less likely when staff work in their home countries. These findings imply that national IO staff use their country-specific knowledge to increase the development effectiveness of procurement in line with the mandate of the World Bank.
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12650
SN - 0952-1895
SN - 1468-0491
VL - 35
IS - 4
SP - 1183
EP - 1203
PB - Wiley-Blackwell
CY - Oxford
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Weaver, Catherine
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko
A1 - Jorgensen, Samantha
A1 - Flores, Joseph
T1 - Bureaucratic representation in the IMF and the World Bank
JF - Global perspectives
N2 - The legitimacy and effectiveness of international organizations are often linked directly to issues of representation—not only on their high-level governing boards and in top leadership but also within their staff. This article explores two key questions of bureaucratic representation in the critical cases of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. First, we seek to unpack three essential dimensions of staff representation—nationality, education, and gender—to explain how representation may matter for international organizations. Second, we aim to describe the multiple dimensions of representation in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank over the past twenty years by deploying a novel dataset on staff demographics, focusing on ranks with decision-making authority within the institutions. Our descriptive analysis reveals that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have made considerable efforts to diversify their bureaucracies. Nonetheless, representation remains uneven; for example, nationals from middle- and low-income countries, women, and staff without economics degrees from prominent US- or UK-based universities are less present in key leadership positions. These results may be well explained by the particular needs of the institutions’ technical mandates and limits in the supply of qualified staff and, as such, need not be seen as suboptimal. Nonetheless, perceived imbalances in representation may continue to pose external legitimation and operational challenges to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in a complex political environment where such multidimensional representation is important to sustaining the buy-in of donor and borrower countries alike. To this end, we recommend that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank enhance their diversity and inclusion efforts by increasing transparency via reporting disaggregated data on workforce composition and introducing annual requirements to publish progress reports with management feedback to strengthen internal and external accountability.
KW - representation
KW - international bureaucracy
KW - multilateralism
KW - World Bank
KW - IMF
Y1 - 2022
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2022.39684
SN - 2575-7350
VL - 3
IS - 1
PB - University of California Press
CY - Oakland, CA
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa
A1 - Liese, Andrea
T1 - Managing performance and winning trust
BT - how World Bank staff shape recipient performance
JF - The review of international organizations
N2 - World Bank evaluations show that recipient performance varies substantially between different projects. Extant research has focused on country-level variables when explaining these variations. This article goes beyond country-level explanations and highlights the role of World Bank staff. We extend established arguments in the literature on compliance with the demands of International Organizations (IOs) and hypothesize that IO staff can shape recipient performance in three ways. First, recipient performance may be influenced by the quality of IO staff monitoring and supervision. Second, the leniency and stringency with which IO staff apply the aid agreement could improve recipient performance. Third, recipient performance may depend on whether IO staff can identify and mobilize supportive interlocutors through their networks in the recipient country. We test these arguments by linking a novel database on the tenure of World Bank task team leaders to projects evaluated between 1986 and 2020. The findings are consistent with the expectation that World Bank staff play an important role, but only in investment projects. There is substantial evidence that World Bank staff supervisory ability and country experience are linked to recipient performance in those projects. Less consistent evidence indicates that leniency could matter. These findings imply that World Bank staff play an important role in facilitating implementation of investment projects.
KW - World Bank
KW - International bureaucrats
KW - Recipient performance
KW - Enforcement
KW - Supervision
KW - Country experience
KW - Compliance
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-021-09414-4
SN - 1559-744X
SN - 1559-7431
SP - 625
EP - 653
PB - Springer
CY - Boston
ER -