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The tyranny of the majority? How pooled and delegated authority shape exit from international organizations

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Abstract

The authority of international organizations (IOs) is generally assumed to drive their member states' contestation even to the point that they terminate their membership. We provide a first systematic assessment of this relationship and suggest that the type of IO authority matters. IOs with pooled authority exert centrifugal effects on their membership since minorities are more likely confronted with adversarial majority decisions. By contrast, IOs with delegated authority exert centripetal effects as they promote non-majoritarian decisions that tend to accommodate the broader membership. A logistic regression analysis drawing on fine-grained information on the pooling and delegation of authority for major IOs supports our claim: Withdrawal is significantly more likely the more authority is pooled, and significantly less likely the more it is delegated. Our findings yield important implications for IO resilience in times of heightened contestation. Rather than driving exit, delegation can help to curb the escalation of contestation.
The tyranny of the majority?
How pooled and delegated authority
shape exit from international organizations
Benjamin Daßler & Tim Heinkelmann-Wild
(Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich)
Abstract:
The authority of international organizations (IOs) is generally assumed to drive their member
states’ contestation even to the point that they terminate their membership. We provide a first
systematic assessment of this relationship and suggest that the type of IO authority matters. IOs
with pooled authority exert centrifugal effects on their membership since minorities are more
likely confronted with adversarial majority decisions. By contrast, IOs with delegated authority
exert centripetal effects as they promote non-majoritarian decisions that tend to accommodate
the broader membership. A logistic regression analysis drawing on fine-grained information on
the pooling and delegation of authority for major IOs supports our claim: Withdrawal is
significantly more likely the more authority is pooled, and significantly less likely the more it
is delegated. Our findings yield important implications for IO resilience in times of heightened
contestation. Rather than driving exit, delegation can help to curb the escalation of contestation.
Keywords: Authority; Delegation; Exit; International Organizations; Pooling; Withdrawal
1
1 Introduction
In recent years, states have increasingly escalated their contestation of international
organizations (IOs) to the extent that they terminated their membership. The United Kingdom
(UK) terminated its membership in the European Union (EU). Under the Trump
Administration, the United States (US) initiated its withdrawal from the World Health
Organization (WHO), the Human Rights Council (UNHRC), and the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Withdrawals tend to harm IOs
as they not only deprive them from material capacities central for their performance, including
resource contributions and staff, but also undermine their public recognition (Helfer 2005;
Tallberg and Zürn 2019; von Borzyskowski and Vabulas 2019; Sommerer 2022).
Scholarship has, in turn, become increasingly interested in member states’ contestation of IOs
in general and their withdrawal in particular. Scholarship has identified domestic, institutional,
and geopolitical sources of withdrawal from IOs (see, e.g., Colantone and Stanig 2018; von
Borzyskowski and Vabulas 2019; Choi 2021). A particularly fast-growing strand of research
posits that the increasing supranational authority of IOs drives their members’ exit (see, e.g.,
Zürn 2018; Hooghe, Lenz, and Marks 2019b; Börzel and Zürn 2021; Vries, Hobolt, and Walter
2021; Walter 2021). To the extent that IOs intrude in states’ national sovereignty, their decisions
become a bone of contention in domestic politics and especially populist-nationalist politicians
seize the opportunity to mobilize publics against supranational IO authority under the banner
of national self-determination (see, e.g., Bearce and Jolliff Scott 2019; Copelovitch and
Pevehouse 2019; Musgrave 2019; Schmidt 2020; Zürn 2021; see also, Norrlof 2018; Norris and
Inglehart 2019).
While we agree that IO authority can affect member states’ withdrawal, we seek to address two
important gaps in this literature. First, existing scholarship more or less explicitly assumes that
2
the authority effect is restricted to the era of increased globalization after the end of the Cold
War. Contributions usually study specific instances of rather recent withdrawals by Western
democracies, most prominently Brexit or the US under President Trump. We therefore lack
studies about how IO authority affected state withdrawal in earlier periods. Second, the
literature suggests that the overall level of supranational IO authority affects membership
withdrawals. Scholarship does not differentiate between different types of IO authority. The
literature thus tends to assume that the delegation of authority to independent IO bodies has the
same effect on exit as member states’ pooling of authority among themselves (see Hooghe and
Marks 2015; Hooghe, Lenz, and Marks 2019a).
This paper strives to address these gaps and asks how and why different types of IO authority
spur or contain membership withdrawals. We claim that different types of IO authority have a
different impact on exit and systematically probe our argument for major IOs since the end of
the Second World War. We suggest that what is commonly considered the effect of (an increase
in) overall supranational authority is in fact a pooling effect, not a delegation effect (Section 2).
We draw on insights from the study of majoritarian and non-majoritarian politics and argue that
ceteris paribus, the pooling of authority increases the likelihood of membership withdrawal,
while the delegation of authority decreases it. IOs with pooled authority, like majoritarian
political orders in general, lend themselves to adversarial decisions that favor majorities at the
expense of minorities and thus exert centrifugal effects. By contrast, the inclusion of non-
majoritarian elements, such as the delegation of authority to independent IO bodies, promotes
decisions that accommodate minorities and thus exerts centripetal effects. We employ logistic
regression models to test our claims with fine-grained data on the pooling and delegation of
authority for withdrawals from major IOs (Section 3). In line with our expectations, we find
that higher degrees of pooling are indeed associated with significantly higher likelihoods of IO
withdrawals, while higher degrees of delegation are associated with significantly lower
3
probabilities of exit (Section 4). These results speak to the ongoing debate about IOs’ robustness
in times of heightened contestation. They suggest that governments should strengthen non-
majoritarian elements in IOs, since delegation to independent IO bodies can help to avoid the
escalation of contestation to exit (Section 5).
2 IO authority and exit
Not all IOs wield authority. In purely intergovernmental IOs, each member retains sovereign
control and decisions are adopted by consensus. When issues become contested among
members in intergovernmental IOs, governments will typically accommodate each other and
strike a compromise; or the dissatisfied member will rely on its veto right and block an
undesired decision. Hence, members of purely intergovernmental IOs have no reason to escalate
their contestation to the extent that they withdraw from them. However, providing every
member with a veto right comes with the downside that only policies will be decided that are
agreeable by the whole membership, oftentimes leading to protracted processes of finding
compromises at the lowest common denominator. To increase the performance of IOs,
governments may thus opt to cede authority to them (see, e.g., Sommerer et al. 2021; Hooghe
and Marks 2015; Blake and Payton 2015; Koremenos, Lipson, and Snidal 2001; Haftel 2012;
Hawkins et al. 2006; Pollack 2003; Koremenos 2016; Hooghe, Lenz, and Marks 2019a). But
governments as boundedly rational actors can never fully anticipate all consequences of their
choices. As scholarship on the contestation of IO authority shows, even when a state once
willingly conceded authority to an IO, it can later become dissatisfied with it. After all, not only
an IO’s broader environment but also characteristics of its membership, its policies, and also a
state’s own priorities can change over time (von Borzyskowski and Vabulas 2019; Choi 2021)
whilst their rules typically evade quick adaption (Fioretos 2011).
4
We agree with this literature that IO authority affects contestation by member state governments
(see, e.g., Zürn 2018; Hooghe, Lenz, and Marks 2019b; Börzel and Zürn 2021; Vries, Hobolt,
and Walter 2021; Walter 2021), but suggest to differentiate its effect on exit as the act of
ultimate disapproval (Hirschman 1970). We posit that whether states escalate contestation to
the extent that they withdraw their membership from an IO is shaped by how authority is
exercised within it. Transferring insights from the study of majoritarian and non-majoritarian
political orders (Lijphart 1985; 1989) to the supranational level, we argue that the handling of
conflicting goals within the membership of IOs with pooled and delegated authority follows
two very different logics that, ceteris paribus, affect the likelihood of exit in very different
ways.
1
Pooled IO authority, like majoritarian political orders more generally, typically lends
itself to adversarial decisions that favor the majority but alienate minorities and thus exert
centrifugal effects. By contrast, the delegation of IO authority to independent third parties
introduces non-majoritarian elements, which typically promote decisions that also
accommodate minorities, and thus exert centripetal effects.
The centrifugal effect of pooled IO authority
An IO wields pooled authority when member state governments cede their veto right and adopt
decisions by majority voting (Hooghe and Marks 2015, 315; see also Keohane and Hoffmann;
Moravcsik 1998; Rittberger 2005). IOs where authority is pooled among member states thus
1
Note that we do not claim that the pooling and delegation of IO authority is the only factor that affects
states’ decision to terminate their membership or not. As research has shown, states’ decision to
withdraw from IOs is shaped by various domestic, institutional, and geopolitical factors (von
Borzyskowski and Vabulas, 2019; Choi 2021). Still, we hold that how an IO wields authority makes
a difference, ceteris paribus, when it comes to a states’ ultimate decision to withdraw from an IO.
We thus shed light onto the pooled and delegated authority as important and distinct additional
explanatory factors of states’ decision to terminate their membership or not which have so far neither
been theorized nor analyzed systematically.
5
share traits of majoritarian political orders where authority lies in the hands of the majority. In
majoritarian political orders, heterogeneity among the membership is addressed by the majority
taking decisions the minority must accept (Beran 1984; Guinier 1994; Lijphart 1985; Buchanan
1991; Norris 1997; Austen‐Smith 2000; Conversi 2012). The emblematic example is the
‘Westminster democracy’ where the party that obtains the parliamentary majority has control
over the legislative and executive branches of government. As majorities are not incentivized
to accommodate minorities, they may even re-distribute benefits from minorities to themselves
(Austen‐Smith 2000). In consequence, majoritarian orders tend to give rise to adversarial
decisions that favor minimum winning coalitions at the expense of minorities (Conversi 2012).
The more the majority systematically votes against the interests of minorities (Ball 1951), and
the larger the divisions between the majority and the minority (Guinier 1994), the more
members of the minority will become frustrated to the extent that they try to avoid exploitation
by withdrawing from the order (Beran 1984; Buchanan 1991).
IOs wielding pooled authority, as majoritarian orders more generally, are thus more likely to
experience membership termination since members in minority positions will become so
dissatisfied that they withdraw. When IO authority is pooled, a narrow majority of member
states will typically form a minimum winning coalition to facilitate the pursuit of shared goals
(Posner and Sykes 2014, 201). While the majority could in principle also accommodate
minorities among the membership, their priority will usually be to promote their respective
national goals. Moreover, the majority in IOs with pooled authority is also typically less
dependent on the support of minorities. After all, minorities in IOs with high degrees of pooled
authority lack the opportunity to block IO decisions and find themselves at the mercy of the
majority (Hershey 1973; Cox and Jacobson 1974; Barnett and Duvall 2005; Lake 2007; Posner
and Sykes 2014; Posner and Weyl 2015; Thompson, Broude, and Haftel 2019). As minorities
among the membership cannot prevent dissatisfying decisions taken by a majority that usually
sees few merits in accommodating them, they will increasingly become frustrated by a ‘tyranny
6
of the majority.’ The more decisions in an IO are adopted by vote, the more likely states in the
minority will become frustrated, and the more likely becomes membership termination.
The case of Japan in the International Whaling Commission (IWC) illustrates how majoritarian
politics in IOs with pooled authority exert centrifugal effects on dissatisfied member states.
While the Japanese government had originally been “content with the IWC’s policies, because
the IWC was initially designed to regulate trade of stocks and to promote a sustainable
development of the whaling industry” (Kolmaš 2021, 6), the common interest in commercial
whaling among IWC’s members gave way to a majority of members in favor of more
protectionist policies. As policies within the IWC are adopted by the ‘one state one vote’
principle, a majority of members led by Western, pro-environmentalist countries like the US
and Germany were successful in initiating a policy shift from regulating commercial whaling
to limiting or even abandoning it completely (Kolmaš 2021). Japan, in turn, saw its interests in
commercial whaling increasingly encroached upon by a growing majority of members in favor
of conservationist policies it could not block because authority in the IWC was pooled
(Urpelainen and van de Graaf 2015). Moreover, Japan’s initiatives to safeguard commercial
whaling were regularly blocked by the anti-whaling majority. The lack of its ability to shape
policies or at least prevent dissatisfying policies due to the pooling of authority in the IWC
alienated the Japanese government more and more from the organization. For instance, a
Japanese representative expressed his frustration about the “denial of the possibility for
governments with different views to coexist with understanding and respect within the IWC.”
2
After failing to achieve accommodation by the majority within the IWC, the Japanese
government in December 2018 eventually proclaimed its withdrawal from the organization.
2
Masaaki Taniai, Japanese Vice-Minister for Fisheries, cited by Barnett (2018).
7
The UK in UNESCO constitutes another example of the centrifugal effect of pooled IO
authority. While one of its founding members, the UK saw itself increasingly confronted with
an adversarial majority during the late 1970s and early 1980s (Ray 1985). As policies within
UNESCO are decided by the ‘one state one vote’ principle, the UK were confronted with a
majority of the member states promoting policies it considered a threat to, inter alia, the
freedom of the press. And since the budget was also adopted by majority voting, other members
could command the UK’s sizeable contributions as well. Due to the pooling of authority among
the membership, the UK became increasingly frustrated with UNESCO. This dissatisfaction
was evident in the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee’s Special Report on Britain’s relationship
with UNESCO in 1984. The report stated that while the organization used to be “a
predominantly Western and Latin American organization pursuing avowedly Western
intellectual and cultural aims and cultural values” (cited by Ray 1985, 253), they increasingly
“find themselves in a minority in programs decision-making” (ibid. 254). The pooling of
authority within UNESCO effectively put the UK at the mercy of the majority of member states
without the opportunity to block dissatisfying decisions, leave alone promoting its own policy
goals. When a UK government official declared the UK’s withdrawal from the organization in
November 1985, he explicitly emphasized his government’s frustration that UNESCO had been
“increasingly used as a forum for the propagation of ideas repugnant to the people of this
country” (Raison 1985). With the authority over policymaking and budget decisions pooled in
the hands of an adversarial majority of member states, the UK opted to terminate its
membership within UNESCO.
Overall, we suggest that to the extent that member states waive their veto rights and pool
authority in IOs, withdrawal becomes more likely because decisions in majoritarian orders tend
to reflect the goals of narrow majorities while leaving minority systematically dissatisfied. All
else equal, we thus expect:
8
H1: The more authority is pooled among the membership, the more likely is exit
(pooling thesis).
The centripetal effect of delegated IO authority
An IO wields delegated authority when governments delegate tasks to independent IO bodies
(Tallberg 2002; Hawkins et al. 2006; Lake 2007, 231; Koremenos 2008; Hooghe and Marks
2015). The delegation of authority in IOs thus shares traits with non-majoritarian political
orders, where authority is diffused and exercised jointly with non-majoritarian institutions. In
non-majoritarian orders, heterogeneity among the membership is addressed by institutional
procedures that constrain the influence of majorities and accommodate diverging goals across
the membership and particularly of minorities (Lijphart 1969; Majone 1994; Andeweg 2000;
Tallberg 2002; Thatcher and Sweet 2002; Levinson 2011). A key instrument to cushion the
influence of the majority and protect minorities in non-majoritarian orders, besides of the
provision of veto rights (Nordlinger 1972, 24–26; Lijphart 1977, 36–38; Guinier 1994;
Thielemann and Zaun 2018), is the delegation of decisions to independent third parties, such as
regulatory agencies (Majone 1994; Tallberg 2002; Thatcher and Sweet 2002). Non-majoritarian
institutions typically avoid blatantly favoring the majority’s position but encourage pareto-
improving choices. Instead, they will usually try to justify their decisions as fostering the
common good of the whole membership and bridge divisions among it. In turn, majorities will
find it difficult to get their way in non-majoritarian orders without compromising on their goals.
As a result, even minorities that are dissatisfied with some aspects of an order will typically
find accommodation and will thus rarely escalate contestation till membership termination.
IOs that wield delegated authority, as non-majoritarian orders more generally, are thus less
likely to experience membership termination since their independent bureaucracies help
preventing states to become dissatisfied to the extent that they withdraw. When governments
9
rescind sovereign control over delegated tasks to independent IO bodies, their authority rests
on the recognition by the member states (Zürn, Binder, and Ecker-Ehrhardt 2012). IO
administrations are generally interested in sustaining their recognized authority (Gray 2018;
Heinkelmann-Wild and Jankauskas 2020; Debre and Dijkstra 2021; Hirschmann 2021;
Schuette 2021). Since the recognition of their authority by member states is contingent on them
acting as stewards of the common good, IO bureaucracies will typically find it hard to favor the
selective interests of a narrow majority. Besides the recognition of their authority, IO
bureaucracies also depend on material support from their membership (see, Stone 2011;
Dijkstra 2017; Heinzel 2021). To maintain the recognition of their authority and their resource
base, independent IO bureaucracies will therefore work toward pareto-improving decisions that
gain support among the broader membership, not just a narrow majority. When members are
dissatisfied with IO decisions, independent IO bureaucracies will try to accommodate them in
order to safeguard their support and participation (see, Stone 2011; Fang and Stone 2012;
Chwieroth 2013; Dijkstra 2017; Haftel and Hofmann 2017; Heinkelmann-Wild and Jankauskas
2020; Heinzel 2021; Schuette 2021). The more authority is delegated to independent IO
bureaucracies, the more they are able to moderate conflicts among the membership, and the less
likely contestation will escalate to full-blown membership termination.
The case of the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) illustrates how non-
majoritarian elements in IOs with delegated authority can exert centripetal effects on
dissatisfied member states. US governments have been increasingly dissatisfied with burden-
sharing within NATO. And while members agreed in 2014 on the goal of spending two percent
of their GDP for defense, most members did not live up to their commitment. Under the
President Donald Trump, the US were at the verge of terminating their membership in NATO
(Schuette 2021; Kruck et al. 2022). While member states were reluctant to accommodate the
US, NATO’s secretariat was prone to ensure the continued participation of the US
(Heinkelmann-Wild and Jankauskas 2020; Schuette 2021). While the independent authority of
10
NATO’s secretariat is arguably limited, its leadership could nevertheless draw on the Secretary-
General’s authority as NATO’s spokesperson as well as its role as permanent chair of the North
Atlantic Council and organizer of NATO summits to influence the meeting agendas and
facilitate compromises among the membership. NATO members followed the lead of
Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and agreed on stepping up their commitment. A move
praised as “tremendous progressby President Trump who even credited Stoltenberg personally
as “outstanding” and thanked him for his “excellent job.”
3
By drawing on the NATO’s
secretariats independent authority, Secretary-General Stoltenberg thus succeeded in containing
the Trump Administration’s contestation and ensure the participation of the US.
Another example of the centripetal effect of delegated IO authority constitutes the case of a
minority of renewable energy friendly countries in the International Energy Agency (IEA). The
group, led by Germany, Denmark, and Spain, had become increasingly dissatisfied with the
organization’s focus on fossil and nuclear energy. Their attempts to push for policy change and
adapt the organization to developments in renewable energy markets were regularly turned
down by a majority of fossil and nuclear friendly states (van de Graaf and Lesage 2009; van de
Graaf 2013). When they were at the brink of withdrawing from the IEA, its bureaucracy
intervened to sustain their membership (Downie 2020). The IEA’s bureaucracy drew on its
delegated authority to accommodate the dissatisfied states. For instance, making use of its
influence over policymaking, it took the lead in broadening the organization’s policy agenda
beyond energy security defined narrowly in terms of oil to the promotion of renewable energy
production. Moreover, drawing on its budget planning competencies, the secretariat not only
created two new divisions focusing on renewable energy and energy efficiency but also
dedicated significant resources to these areas (Downie 2020, 3–4). Due to its delegated
3
Donald Trump, President of the US, cited by The White House (2019).
11
authority, the IEA’s bureaucracy was thus able to accommodate the dissatisfied minority of
states favoring renewable energy and thereby ensure their participation in the organization.
Overall, we thus suggest that the delegation of authority to independent IO bodies will render
membership termination less likely as they will typically try to bridge divides among the
membership and accommodate dissatisfied states. All else equal, we therefore expect:
H2: The more authority is delegated to an IO bureaucracy, the less likely is exit
(delegation thesis).
3 Research design
To test our claims about the differentiated effect of IO authority on states’ exit, we draw on
fine-grained data on the pooling and delegation of authority and analyze state withdrawals from
major IOs. We compiled this information from two datasets: First, data on IO membership
termination compiled by von Borzyskowski and Vabulas (2019) on the basis of the Correlates
of War (CoW) dataset (Pevehouse et al. 2020) for the period from 1945 through 2014. Second,
the Measuring International Authority dataset (MIA v.2), created by Tobias Lenz, Yoram
Haftel, Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, Dan Eran, and Mona Saleh, which provides for the period
of 1950-2019 detailed information on the pooling and delegation of authority for 76 major IOs
that “have standing in international politics” (Hooghe, Lenz, and Marks 2019a, 31) because
their decisions are consequential due to their resources and competences. Since we lack
observations for withdrawal for two of these major IOs, our sample comprises 74 IOs for the
period 1950-2014 that experienced 106 instances of member state termination.
4
Due to the
4
In the Appendix, we provide detailed information about the IOs that experienced withdrawal along
with their pooling and delegation scores (see Appendix A.2) as well as the states that terminated their
membership in them (see Appendix A.3).
12
relative rarity of exit, we employ a Firth logistic regression analysis, which has proven to be a
reliable estimation technique in cases of rare event data as it produces unbiased estimates
especially when the values of the binary dependent variable are strongly unevenly distributed,
while, as compared to the rare event logistic regression as proposed by King and Zeng (2001),
allowing for various accurate post-estimation analyses (Ogundimu 2019).
5
The dependent variable measures the occurrence of state membership withdrawal from IOs,
sourced from von Borzyskowski and Vabulas (2019). As our interest is on how organizational
characteristics shape exit, while controlling for state characteristics, the unit of analysis are IO-
member state-years. The dependent variable assumes ‘1’ if a member state announced to
terminate its membership in an IO in a year, and ‘0’ otherwise.
To measure our two key independent variables, we draw on the fine-grained information of
major IOs’ authority from the MIA dataset. It measures pooling by the extent to which member
states share decision-making authority through non-unanimous voting and delegation by the
allocation of authoritative competences by member states to non-state bodies across different
areas of IO decision-making: policymaking, constitutional reform, budgetary allocation,
financial compliance, accession of new member states, and member state suspension.
6
The
5
We nevertheless show the robustness of our findings by replicating our main models drawing on rare
event logistic regression since this method was used by von Borzyskowski and Vabulas (2019) (see
Appendix A.8).
6
Instead of focusing on specific areas of decision-making, we draw on the aggregated pooling and
delegation indicators for our main analysis since they may all be related to states’ decision to
withdrawal from an IO. Besides chances of policies or rules that induce costs on members, questions
of budgetary contributions and membership are highly contentious in IOs. For instance, major donor
states have repeatedly withdrawn from IOs because they lacked a say in how their budgetary
contributions where distributed. Moreover, Israel and the US have terminated their membership in
IOs because of the accession of Palestine. In the Appendix, we calculate additional models that entail
disaggregated measures of IO authority (see Appendix, Table A.6).
13
aggregate pooling and delegation scores might vary over time and can range from 0 to 1
respectively.
While the MIA dataset provides us with the advantage of strong measurement validity of the
pooling and delegation of IO authority, it also restricts our sample to 74 major IOs. While this
restricts the external validity of our findings, we claim that the analysis of exit from those 74
major IOs constitutes an ‘elk test’ for our expectations about the impact of pooled and delegated
IO authority on membership termination. If IO authority does not affect member states’ exit in
these major IOs, this should also not be the case for minor IOs. To explore the external validity
of our findings, we also draw on the comprehensive CoW sample of 489 IOs from 1945 through
2014 by drawing on less fine-grained proxies for pooled and delegated IO authority after the
main analysis (see also, Appendix A.4).
While we suggest that, ceteris paribus, the pooling and delegation of IO authority affects
membership termination other factors can also shape states’ decisions to withdraw from IOs.
We therefore draw on the seminal study of von Borzyskowski and Vabulas (2019) and include
additional variables to control for domestic, institutional, and geo-political factors as well as
further potential confounders related to exit or IO authority.
To account for domestic factors that might affect IO withdrawals, we included three state-level
controls. First, we included member states’ democracy level, drawing on states’ polity2 scores
in the previous year sourced from the polity4 dataset (Marshall, Jaggers, and Gurr 2010) ranging
from a minimum score of -10 to a maximum score of 10, representing the highest level of state
democracy. As changes in government orientation might impact a state’s policy vis-à-vis IOs,
and thus its withdrawal decisions, we included a binary variable, sourced from von
Borzyskowski and Vabulas (2019), that indicates whether a state’s government orientation
changed between left, right, and center or not. We further include a variable that measures
nationalism as another potential driver of IO withdrawals. We include a dummy variable, coded
14
by Borzyskowski and Vabulas (2019) based on information of the Database of Political
Institutions (DPI), that indicates whether any party in a country emphasizes national or ethnic
identity. We also calculate a robustness check with an alternative, leader-based measurement
of nationalism complied by Choi (2021) (see Appendix A.5).
To account for institutional factors, we include four IO-level factors. First, an IO’s level of
institutionalization captures an IO’s overall policymaking, monitoring, and enforcement
capacities. The respective information stems from Karreth and Tir (2013), who distinguish
between low, medium, and highly structured IOs. Second, since the overall democracy score of
an IO my shape governments’ withdrawal, we include the variable IO average democracy score
which, following the calculation of Pevehouse (2002), indicates how many members of an IO
were democracies in the previous year. Finally, the issues addressed by an IO might affect states
choice to withdrawal as some issue areas might be more prone to exit than others (von
Borzyskowski and Vabulas 2019). Moreover, whether an IO’s mandate is task-specific or
general purpose also affects the pooling and delegation of authority (Hooghe and Marks 2015).
We thus follow von Borzyskowski and Vabulas (2019) by including two dummy variables for
political issues and economic issues, while security constitutes the reference category. We also
calculate a robustness check with a dummy distinguishing task-specific and general purpose
IOs (Lenz et al. 2015; Hooghe, Lenz, and Marks 2019a) (see Appendix A.5).
To account for geo-political factors, we included three control variables. As previous studies
found evidence of a contagion effect of the withdrawal by a leading state from an IO, we include
a variable, sourced from von Borzyskowski and Vabulas (2019), that indicates whether the
largest economic power has withdrawn from the organization in the year before, or not. We
also include the variable state power change, compiled by von Borzyskowski and Vabulas
(2019) based on data from Greig and Enterline (2017), which comprises the differences in
national military capabilities between the present and the previous year. Third, a state’s
15
diverging preferences from the average preferences of all member states can impact IO exit. As
a proxy for statespreferences, we draw on data of Bailey, Strezhnev, and Voeten (2017) on
state’s voting in the UN General Assembly.
We further included potential confounders emphasized by scholarship on membership
termination as well as on the pooling and delegation of IO authority. First, the length of
membership might be correlated with the mismatch between a states’ (current) preferences and
the IOs’ policies, as well as the democracy score over time (von Borzyskowski and Vabulas
2019). This variable constitutes the (logged) number of years a specific state has been a member
of an IO in the previous year. Second, we included IO size as it might be correlated with
preference divergence and democratic density (von Borzyskowski and Vabulas 2019), as well
as the pooling and delegation of authority (Hooghe and Marks 2015). The variable measures
the (logged) number of other IO member states in the IO in the previous year.
4 Logistic regression analysis of state withdrawal
To assess our hypotheses about the effect of the pooling and delegation of IO authority on
membership withdrawal, we calculate four models. All models analyze the main effects of our
independent variables of interests pooling and delegation while controlling for states’
membership duration and an IO’s size. Models 1-3 account for domestic, institutional, and geo-
political factors separately while Model 4 comprises all control variables. Model 1 includes
domestic factors, i.e., nationalism, the level of democracy, government orientation change.
Model 2 includes institutional characteristics, i.e., IOs’ degree of institutionalization, their
average democracy score, as well as the issue areas they address. Model 3 includes geopolitical
factors, i.e., changes in member states’ power and their preference divergences from IOs’
average, as well as the contagion effect of a leading state’s withdrawal. The availability of
16
information on the control variables limits the observations as well as periods of analysis across
the four models.
Table 4: Four Firth logistic regression models of IO withdrawal.
Domestic
(1976-2014)
IO
(1976-2014)
Geopolitics
(1950-2012)
Full Model
(1976-2012)
Pooling
3.840***
2.496***
2.314***
4.473***
(1.127)
(0.781)
(0.783)
(1.287)
Delegation
-4.033***
-1.410
-2.519**
-5.081***
(1.303)
(1.032)
(1.072)
(1.566)
Institutionalization
-0.307**
-0.477**
(0.136)
(0.198)
IO Average Democracy Score
-0.00456
-0.0543
(0.0257)
(0.0368)
IO Issue Politics
-0.994**
-0.132
(0.427)
(0.644)
IO Issue Economy
0.128
0.776
(0.283)
(0.493)
Democracy
0.0227
0.0354*
(0.0178)
(0.0213)
Nationalism
0.0402
-0.621
(0.320)
(0.455)
State Power Change
-1.045***
-1.038**
(0.241)
(0.482)
Preference Diversion From IO Average
0.838***
0.734***
(0.132)
(0.212)
Contagion
2.817***
2.101***
(0.557)
(0.662)
IO Size
-1.143***
-0.917***
-1.109***
-1.228***
(0.171)
(0.136)
(0.139)
(0.204)
IO Membership Duration
-0.461***
-0.310***
-0.342***
-0.359**
(0.135)
(0.113)
(0.114)
(0.152)
Constant
-2.237***
-2.637***
-3.112***
-2.295**
(0.562)
(0.609)
(0.463)
(0.915)
AIC
954.8008
1544.568
1327.494
784.115
BIC
1022.596
1624.374
1407.652
918.7275
Observations
118,772
154,257
166,003
110,766
Note: Dependent variable IO withdrawal; *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1.
17
The models lend support to our theoretical expectations. In line with our pooling hypothesis
(H1), we find a positive and significant association between the degree of pooled authority and
the probability of IO withdrawal. In line with our delegation hypothesis (H2), we find a negative
association between delegation and IO withdrawal across all specifications but Model 2,
accounting only for IO characteristics, where the coefficient points in the right direction but
does not reach statistical significance. This finding underlines the importance of controlling for
domestic and geopolitical factors as also reflected in the strongly improved fit of our complete
Model 4. Overall, the four models corroborate our argument that, ceteris paribus, the type of
IO authority matters for states’ choice to terminate their membership or not. While the pooling
of authority appears to exert a centrifugal effect on the members of the 74 major IOs in our
sample, the delegation of authority seems to exert a centripetal effect.
These effects are not only statistically significant but also substantially relevant. We calculated
the predicted probability of withdrawal at different values of both, the pooling and the
delegation indicator while holding all other variables of our full Model 4 at their means.
Corroborating our expectations that, ceteris paribus, with higher degrees of pooled authority,
we observe higher probabilities of state withdrawal. As Figure 1a indicates, its highest observed
value, 0.75 is associated with an almost 30 times higher probability of state withdrawal as
compared to its lowest value 0 (all other variables of Model 4 as observed). To be sure, the
absolute changes in probability are low which is due to the very rare baseline probability of
withdrawal. Nevertheless, there is a substantial increase in the probability of exit associated
with increasing levels of pooled authority. Figure 2b illustrates the significantly negative effect
of delegation on the probability of membership termination. Here, the probability of exit (all
other variables of Model 4 as observed) steadily decreases with increasing levels of delegated
authority. The highest level of delegation observed in our sample, 0.65, is associated with an
18
approximately 20 times lower probability of withdrawal as compared to the lowest observed
level of delegation, 0 (all other variables of Model 4 as observed).
Figure 1: Predictive probabilities of IO withdrawal at different levels of IO authority.
a) Pooling b) Delegation
Note: Pooling, delegation and the probability of IO exit. Graph show the predicted probabilities of withdrawal at different levels of
pooling and delegation.; black line gives point estimates while grey dashed lines represent 95% confidence intervals; rug plot at the
bottom illustrates the distribution of pooling and delegation.
Turning to the additional variables for which we controlled in our models, the results in our
sample of 74 major IOs largely correspond to the findings of von Borzykowski and Vabulas
(2019). The coefficients of the variables preference divergence from IO average as well as
contagion are highly significant and positive, suggesting that, on average, higher preference
divergences and the withdrawal by lead states increase the probability of exit. Our full Model
4 further suggests that states’ level of democracy has a small but significantly positive effect
on withdrawal. The negatively significant coefficients of IO size as well as IO membership
duration indicate that exit is less likely from larger than smaller IOs and that member states are
less likely to exit IOs the longer they have participated in them.
19
Our findings are generally robust to several additional tests and specifications. To explore the
external validity of our findings, we replicate our analysis in the more comprehensive CoW
sample (see Appendix A.4). Drawing on the CoW sample extends our analysis to 489 IOs while
we must compromise on measurement validity since our reliance on the fine-grained pooling
and delegation indicators limited our analysis to 74 major IOs covered by the MIA dataset. For
the CoW sample, we therefore draw on two less fine-grained proxies for delegated and pooled
IO authority based on the voting rules in their main decision-making body (see Blake and
Payton 2015) as well as their secretariat’s independence and tasks (see Reinsberg and
Westerwinter 2019).
7
The results corroborate our findings about the centrifugal effect of
pooling since our binary pooling proxy is positively and highly significantly correlated with
statesprobability to exit. The delegation proxy exhibits no statistically significant effect on
membership termination in the CoW sample. While our auxiliary measure for delegation is
arguably rough, a plausible interpretation of this result is that the scope of our delegation
hypothesis is limited to major IOs, covered by the MIA sample. Even if the bureaucracies of
minor IOs wield formal authority, their capacities might still be insufficient to effectively curb
members’ contestation and prevent membership termination.
7
More specifically, as a proxy for pooling, we included a binary variable that takes the value ‘1’ if an
IO’s decisions are obligatory and adopted by majority voting and the value ‘0’ whenever one of these
two features is not present. We derived information on non-unanimous decision-making from Blake
and Payton (2015) and on obligation from Reinsberg and Westerwinter (2019). As a proxy for
delegation, we constructed a multiplicative index which comprises, on the one hand, whether an IO’s
secretariat is independent and, on the other hand, whether it is tasked with enforcement, dispute
settlement, or monitoring. Our delegation variable can take four values, ranging from ‘0’ (no
delegation) to ‘3’ (all delegation features are present simultaneously). We put special emphasis on a
secretariat’s independence as the delegation of authority implies that it must possess the agency to
autonomously enact the tasks the IO was entrusted with. We sourced the respective information from
Reinsberg and Westerwinter (2019).
20
The results for both the MIA and the CoW sample remain robust when including additional
potential confounders for a member state’s power, IO withdrawal clauses, political backsliding,
a leadership-based indicator of nationalism as developed by Choi (2021), an IO being task
specific or general purpose (Lenz et al. 2015), as well as IOs being UN agencies (see Appendix
A.5). With regards to operationalization, the results remain robust when disaggregating the
pooling and delegation indicators in the MIA sample of 74 major IOs (Appendix A.6) and for
differently specifying these indicators in the comprehensive CoW Sample of 493 IOs (see
Appendix A.7). The results also remain robust when dropping the variable government
orientation change, which restricted our analysis to the period from 1975 to 2014; and when
splitting the samples into a Cold War and a post-Cold War period (see Appendix A.8).
We also ran our analysis with alternative estimation methods for both the MIA and the CoW
sample. First, we used ordinary logit models in to include cluster standard errors on IOs as well
as countries (see Appendix A.9). Moreover, we replicated our main models using rare event
logistic regression as proposed by King and Zeng (2001) (see Appendix A.10). Finally, we
calculated conditional logit models to account for potential hidden unit heterogeneity across
countries (see Appendix A.11). The results throughout all these specifications remain robust.
5 Conclusion
In this paper, we theoretically developed and empirically tested the claim that different types of
IO authority yield different effects on membership withdrawal. A Firth logistic regression
analysis drawing on fine-grained data for 74 major IOs lends support to our expectations that
the pooling of authority among IO member states increases the probability of exit, while the
delegation of authority to IO bureaucracies decreases the likelihood of state withdrawal. These
findings allow us to add nuance to the common assumption that the probability of membership
21
termination generally increases with an IO’s overall authority. It is not authoritative IOs per se
that face an increased likelihood of exit but those where members have extensively pooled
authority over key decisions. By contrast, the delegation of authority to independent IO bodies
can even help to prevent membership termination. While we do not dispute that an IO’s overall
authority may drive its contestation, our findings support our claim that whether states escalate
their contestation to the point of membership withdrawal is, ceteris paribus, shaped by how
authority is exercised within it.
Our findings also yield important implications for the resilience of IOs in times of heightened
contestation. When discussing opportunities to increase the resilience of IOs, scholarship, on
the one hand, often problematizes the input legitimacy of authoritative IOs due to the power
wielded by ‘technocratic’ bureaucracies (Steffek 2021) or the ‘non-majoritarian’ character of
IOs (Zürn 2021) and call for a ‘democratization’ of IOs (Dahl, Shapiro, and Hacker-Cordon
1999; Dingwerth, Schmidtke, and Weise 2020; Verweij and Josling 2003). On the other hand,
scholarship also points to deficits of IOs’ output legitimacy since they are often trapped in
‘gridlock’ (Hale, Held, and Young 2013) due to governments’ opposition against further steps
in cooperation (see also, Hooghe and Marks 2009). At first glance, rescinding delegated
authority to decrease the power of IO bureaucracies and increasing pooled authority to facilitate
IO policymaking seems to be the way forward. However, our findings advise otherwise: Rather
than handing over more authority to majorities of member states, governments should instead
diffuse authority among the membership and share authority with non-majoritarian bodies. Like
the designers of domestic institutions use non-majoritarian elements to bridge divided societies
(see Lijphart 1985; Norris 1997), governments may increase the resilience of authoritative IOs
by designing institutional rules that promote the accommodation of the broader membership
beyond narrow majorities. An IO’s authoritative bureaucracy can help to bridge divides among
its members and cushion the ‘tyranny of the majority.’ Delegation can curb contestation!
22
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