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The United States has helped create and lead many international organizations (IOs). Yet in the last six years, the US announced its withdrawal from several IOs including the World Health Organization, UNESCO, and the Universal Postal Union. Do Americans care about US withdrawals from IOs? When do Americans support withdrawing from IOs and support...
Citations
... Publics in these countries care deeply about their country's influence in IOs, providing leaders reason to remain invested(Brutger & Clark, 2022;von Borzyskowski & Vabulas, 2024). ...
Member state participation is essential in global governance, affording international organizations (IOs) legitimacy and translating member state preferences into institutional attention. We contend that institutional leadership positions bolster states’ authority via “proxy representation,” in which states are grouped together and indirectly represented by one leader. We argue that by serving as proxy group leaders, even relatively weak states can obtain greater influence in IOs. We examine these expectations in the context of the IMF’s Executive Board, where wealthy states represent themselves directly while other states belong to multi-member constituencies in which leadership often rotates among members. Focusing on issues related to climate change discussions at the IMF—a key concern for Global South countries and an increasingly important issue in international finance—we examine the extent to which countries’ preferences over climate issues are expressed at IMF Board meetings. Using textual data based on 52,551 internal IMF documents from 1987-2017, we find evidence to support our theoretical expectations; states more effectively advance their preferences when they are proxy leaders — this finding holds robustly even for otherwise weak states. These results suggest that even in IOs with highly asymmetric decision-making, weaker states can gain voice through proxy representation. This has important and positive implications for IO legitimacy, as member state participation is integral to the livelihood of these institutions.
... The Liberal International Order (LIO) is in crisis and its resilience is an open question (Ikenberry 2018;Börzel and Zürn 2021;Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Hofmann 2020;Lake, Martin and Risse 2021;Liu and Yang 2023;Ikenberry 2024). Legacy institutions of the LIO, such as the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are being attacked not only from states at the peripheries of the order, such as rising powers, but also by those established powers that have been instrumental in their creation (Zürn 2018; Copelovitch and Pevehouse 2019; Heinkelmann-Wild, Kruck and Daßler 2021;Hopewell 2021;Kreuder-Sonnen and Rittberger 2022;Borzyskowski and Vabulas 2024a;Lipps and Jacob 2024). Contestation from highly dissatisfied and materially powerful member states poses a significant challenge to institutional institutions. ...
International institutions are increasingly under attack from their member states, who embark on varying and sometimes escalating modes of contestation. At the same time, states’ negative institutional power, i.e. their opportunities to avoid undesired outcomes in international institutions, has been declining for some time. This paper claims that dissatisfied states’ negative institutional power endowments are key to understanding their varying contestation modes: the more limited (extensive) the negative institutional power of dissatisfied states in an institution, the more radical (moderate) modes of institutional contestation they will choose. We argue that, all else equal, states’ (1) inside options to prevent undesired outcomes within the institution and (2) their outside options to evade undesired outcomes by leaving the institution jointly condition whether they choose a strategy of voice, subversion, exit, or rollback to contest the dissatisfying institution. We assess the plausibility of our Negative Institutional Power Theory (NIPT) by means of four detailed case studies of the Trump Administration’s contestation of the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Paris Agreement, and the Iran Nuclear Deal. We demonstrate the generalizability of our arguments by assessing our claims across eight additional instances of other dissatisfied powers’ contesting different international institutions. The twelve case studies demonstrate that negative power matters for states’ choice of institutional contestation modes. Our findings suggest that whether, in the future, international institutions will be increasingly challenged from within and outside, can be influenced by reforms that grant (or deny) states negative institutional power.
... In some articles, IO life stages act as an outcome of interests (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni & Verdier, 2024;Haftel & Nadel, 2024). Other articles examine phenomena at the IO level that drive variation in IO vitality, such as legitimation activities (Schmidtke & Lenz, 2024), individual-level participation in IO debates (Baturo & Gray, 2024), and a hegemon's threat of withdrawal (Vabulas & von Borzyskowski, 2024). There is also an investigation of the consequences of IO vitality for the international system (Schmidt, 2024). ...
International organizations’ lives often extend far beyond the moment of their initial contracting. How IOs do adapt to shifting circumstances in their member states global geopolitical changes, and even internal dynamics within the IO itself? This special issue on the life cycle of international cooperation explores the ebbs and flows of the IOs that underpin the international system. Firm theory, organizational sociology, and agency theory all have incorporated life cycles perspectives into the study of organizations, but IR has yet to fully harness these frameworks. A life cycles approach centers on, first, incorporating the IO itself as the core unit of analysis and, second, the dynamic processes within IOs — including life stages such as false starts, consolidation, inertia, growth, revitalization, death, and succession. Incorporating these dynamic processes into our understanding of IOs reminds us that historically, IOs have always experienced periods of both flourishing and faltering. Grasping the mechanisms that drive these changes is indispensable for a thorough understanding of the international system’s vitality and resilience. Articles in this issue explore the durability of IOs in the face of crises; the measures that IOs deploy to legitimize their existence; the role of individual leaders’ rhetoric in IO vitality; the tradeoffs that member states face between pulling the plug on an IO versus creating a new institution; the effect of member-state IO withdrawal on the international system overall; and the mass public’s perceptions of such withdrawals.
... Relatedly, Jensen and Slapin (2012) and Slapin (2009) develop theoretical models explaining the conditions under which one state opting out of a treaty commitment will either lead to opt-out cascades or prompt remaining states to pursue deeper integration; see also Haftel and Nadel (2024). 6 On how withdrawal shapes public opinion in the exiting, see von Borzyskowski and Vabulas (2024). ...
I argue that treaty withdrawal has two opposing effects on the development of international law. First, it directly impacts the treaty where it occurs by pushing the remaining members to adopt reforms to maintain cooperation. Second, it indirectly affects the development of other treaties by damaging diplomatic relations between the withdrawing state and other members, hindering negotiations in other areas of cooperation. Consequentially, treaty withdrawal has a mixed impact on the development of international law: it expedites the reform of one treaty while inhibiting reform elsewhere. I test this argument by applying a difference-in-differences design to an original panel of treaties built from the records of the United Nations. My findings reveal that while withdrawal increases the number of reforms in treaties where it occurs, it decreases reforms in similar treaties with comparable memberships. The indirect effect more than cancels out the direct effect. Overall, treaty withdrawal impedes the creation of new international laws.
While many scholars expect people's ideological orientations to drive their beliefs regarding the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs), research has found surprisingly limited support for this common assumption. In this article we resolve this puzzle by introducing the perceived ideological profile of IOs as a critical factor shaping the relationship between ideological orientation and such beliefs. Theoretically, we argue that citizens accord IOs greater legitimacy when they perceive these organizations as ideologically more congruent with their own orientations. Empirically, we evaluate this expectation by combining observational and experimental analyses of new survey evidence from four countries: Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, and the United States. We find that citizens indeed perceive IOs as having particular ideological profiles and that those perceptions systematically moderate the relationship between people's ideological orientations and their sense of IOs’ legitimacy. These findings suggest that political ideology is a more powerful driver of legitimacy beliefs in global governance than previously understood.
Recent research has drawn attention to states’ backlash against international organizations (IOs), including whether member state withdrawals affect the longevity of IOs. We therefore ask when do member state withdrawals lead to the death of IOs? We are skeptical of a general link between withdrawal and IO death because on average, any one member is not critical for the survival of an IO. Also, withdrawal is often driven by one member state’s preferences diverging from remaining members; these remaining states may band together after withdrawal, ensuring or even enhancing the longevity of the IO. Even withdrawal by several states may not contribute to IO death because a smaller group of remaining members may better overcome collective action challenges. Nonetheless, exit by an important member may affect IO survival by removing resources, market power, and guidance. We test these arguments using survival models on an original dataset of withdrawals across 532 IOs from 1909 to 2014/2020 and illustrate the dynamics with case vignettes. The results support our arguments: withdrawals in general do not lead to IO death but the withdrawal of founding members can speed IO death. Interestingly, withdrawal by economically powerful states seems to facilitate IO survival (often through reform and/or re-entry). These findings contribute to a better understanding of the lifecycle of IOs as well as to the resilience and vulnerabilities of international cooperation.
How do hard economic times affect countries’ foreign policy and, specifically, their international commitments? Although a large body of literature assumes that economic crises lead to the prioritization of domestic politics at the expense of international cooperation, these claims are rarely subjected to systematic empirical tests. This study examines one important aspect of these relationships: the consequences of economic crises for the survival of international organizations (IOs), a question that attracted only scant scholarly attention to date. Theoretically, we argue that even though economic crises can weaken member states’ commitment to IOs, they also underscore their ability to tackle the root causes of such crises and mitigate their most pernicious effects. As such, economic crises are actually conducive to IO longevity. We expect this effect to be especially pronounced for currency crises, IOs with an economic mandate, and regional IOs, given their particular relevance for international cooperation during hard economic times. These conjectures are tested with a comprehensive sample of IOs and data on currency, banking and sovereign debt crises from 1970 to 2014. Using event history models and controlling for several alternative explanations of IO survival, we find ample empirical support for the theoretical expectations.
