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SNS Democracy Council 2023
(2023)
Transboundary problems such as climate change, military conflicts, trade barriers, and refugee flows require increased collaboration across borders. This is to a large extent possible using existing international organizations. In such a case, however, they need to be considerably strengthened – while current trends take us in the opposite direction, according to the researchers in the SNS Democracy Council 2023.
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.
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.
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.
The limitations and possibilities of the state in solving societal problems are perennial issues in the political and policy sciences and increasingly so in studies of environmental politics. With the aim of better understanding the role of the state in addressing environmental degradation through policy making, this article investigates the nexus between the environmental policy outputs and the environmental performance. Drawing on three theoretical perspectives on the state and market nexus in the environmental dilemma, we identify five distinct pathways. We then examine the extent to which these pathways are manifested in the real world. Our empirical investigation covers up to 37 countries for the period 1970–2010. While we see no global pattern of linkages between policy outputs and performance, our exploratory analysis finds evidence of policy effects, which suggest that the state can, under certain circumstances, improve the environment through policy making.
Reply and Counter-Reply
(2023)
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.
Review symposium
(2023)
Steffen Ganghof’s Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism: Democratic Design and the Separation of Powers (Oxford University Press, 2021) posits that “in a democracy, a constitutional separation of powers between the executive and the assembly may be desirable, but the constitutional concentration of executive power in a single human being is not” (Ganghof, 2021). To consider, examine and theorise about this, Ganghof urges engagement with semi-parliamentarism. As explained by Ganghof, legislative power is shared between two democratically legitimate sections of parliament in a semi-parliamentary system, but only one of those sections selects the government and can remove it in a no-confidence vote. Consequently, power is dispersed and not concentrated in the hands of any one person, which, Ganghof argues, can lead to an enhanced form of parliamentary democracy. In this book review symposium, George Tsebelis, Michael Thies, José Antonio Cheibub, Rosalind Dixon and Daniel Bogéa review Steffen Ganghof’s book and engage with the author about aspects of research design, case selection and theoretical argument. This symposium arose from an engaging and constructive discussion of the book at a seminar hosted by Texas A&M University in 2022. We thank Prof José Cheibub (Texas A&M) for organising that seminar and Dr Anna Fruhstorfer (University of Potsdam) for initiating this book review symposium.
Structural duration conveys stability but also resilience in central government and is therefore a key issue in the debate on the structure and organization of government. This paper discusses three core variants of structural duration to study the explanatory relevance of politics. We compare these durations across ministerialunits in four European democracies (Germany, France, The Netherlands, and Norway) from 1980 to 2013, totaling over 17,000 units. Our empirical analyses show that cabinets’ ideological turnover and extremism are the most significant predictors of all variants of duration, whereas polarization in parliament as well as new prime ministers without office experience yield the predicted significant negative effects for most models. We discuss these findings and avenues for futureresearch that acknowledge the definition and measures for structural change as well as temporal aspects of the empirical phenomenon more explicitly.