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The Review of International Organizations
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-024-09574-z
Abstract
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 unde-
sired outcomes in international institutions, has been declining for some time. This
paper claims that dissatised states’ negative institutional power endowments are
key to understanding their varying contestation modes: the more limited (extensive)
the negative institutional power of dissatised states in an institution, the more radi-
cal (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 dissatised powers’ contesting dierent international institutions.
The twelve case studies demonstrate that negative power matters for states’ choice
of institutional contestation modes. Our ndings suggest that whether, in the future,
international institutions will be increasingly challenged from within and outside,
can be inuenced by reforms that grant (or deny) states negative institutional power.
Keywords International institutions · Institutional power · Contestation · Veto
power · Externalities
JEL Classication F02 · F13 · F18 · F33 · F34 · F51 · F53 · F55
Accepted: 7 October 2024
© The Author(s) 2024
How negative institutional power moderates contestation:
Explaining dissatised powers’ strategies towards
international institutions
BenjaminDaßler1· TimHeinkelmann-Wild1· AndreasKruck1
Responsible editor: Axel Dreher
Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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B. Daßler et al.
1 Introduction
The Liberal International Order (LIO) is in crisis and its resilience is an open ques-
tion (Ikenberry, 2018; Börzel & Zürn, 2021; Eilstrup-Sangiovanni & Hofmann,
2020; Lake et al., 2021; Liu & Yang, 2023; Ikenberry, 2024). Legacy institutions of
the LIO, such as the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), or the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund (IMF) are being attacked not only by 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 & Pevehouse, 2019;
Heinkelmann-Wild et al., 2021; Hopewell, 2021; Kreuder-Sonnen & Rittberger,
2022; Borzyskowski & Vabulas, 2024a; Lipps & Jacob, 2024). Contestation from
highly dissatised and materially powerful member states poses a signicant chal-
lenge to institutional institutions. It threatens to harm the viability and legitimacy
of contested institutions and may even lead to their decline and ‘death’ (Eckhard et
al., 2018; Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, 2018; Deitelho & Zimmermann, 2019; Debre &
Dijkstra, 2020; Hirschmann, 2021; Sommerer et al., 2022; Dijkstra et al., 2024; Gray,
2024; Panke et al., 2024a; Schmidt, 2024; Dijkstra et al., 2025).
Dissatised powers contest international institutions, i.e., international agree-
ments and organizations, in various ways (Chan, 2021; Dijkstra & Ghassim, 2024;
Hirschmann, 2020; He et al., 2021; Stephen & Zürn, 2019). They publicly voice
criticism of international institutions. For example, the US under President Donald
Trump publicly criticized the UN, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),
and the World Bank (Schuette, 2021; Kruck et al., 2022). Similarly, French Presi-
dent Emmanuel Macron even declared NATO “braindead” for its lack of strategic
leadership (cited in Erlanger, 2019). Contestation goes beyond words when power-
ful states engage in the subversion of dissatisfying institutions. For instance, Brazil
and India forged developing country coalitions that in the 2000s and 2010s under-
mined rule- and decision-making at the ministerial conferences of the World Trade
Organization (WTO) out of dissatisfaction with their limited say in the institution
(Zangl et al., 2016), while China set up competing institutions such as the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to challenge the dominance of the Bretton
Woods institutions (Qian et al., 2023). Some dissatised powers also opt to exit inter-
national institutions (Borzyskowski & Vabulas, 2019, 2024a, 2024b; Schmidt, 2023).
For instance, the Bush Administration withdrew the US from the Kyoto Protocol on
climate change, and the UK left the EU. Even after withdrawing from international
institutions, some dissatised powers try to roll back their inuence from outside. For
example, after its exit from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 2018,
Japan has actively been working to counter the organization from outside.
These dierent modes of contestation– voice, subversion, exit, and rollback–
entail dierent degrees of damage to the contested institutions; and they may make
a dierence for the temporary or lasting character of the deterioration of relations
between contesting states and contested institutions. At the same time, the causes
of this variation in dissatised powers’ contestation of international institutions are
poorly understood. There is anecdotal evidence of states, such as the UK in the run-
up to Brexit or the Trump Administration in its contestation of the WTO, linking
their contestation of international institutions to their inability to prevent undesired
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
institutional policies and their goal to ‘take back control’. This is reected in recent
research on international authority, its politicization, and the endogenous sources
of the contestation of the LIO, which suggests that member states’ contestation
of international institutions may be related to a general decline in states’ negative
institutional power in international institutions, i.e., their institutionally determined
opportunities to avoid undesired outcomes brought about by international institutions
(Zürn, 2018; Kreuder-Sonnen & Rittberger, 2023; Heinkelmann-Wild et al., 2024;
Goddard et al., 2024; Kreuder-Sonnen & Zangl, 2024). Such opportunities include
internal options to prevent undesired policies (e.g., through veto rights) and external
options to evade undesired outcomes (e.g., thanks to the availability of attractive
unilateral, bilateral or multilateral outside alternatives to which a dissatised power
might shift) (see, e.g. Lipscy, 2015, 2017; Biermann & Daßler, 2024; Daßler, 2023).
States’ negative institutional power has declined in the wake of increased globaliza-
tion and interdependence as well as an ensuing growth of the authority of many
international institutions (Hooghe & Marks, 2015; Zürn, 2018; Hooghe et al., 2019).
Pooling and delegation of authority in international institutions have reduced states’
opportunities to block undesired institutional outcomes. Moreover, as international
institutions have become more intrusive (Börzel & Zürn, 2021), their bureaucracies
have become more independent (Bauer & Ege, 2016; Debre & Dijkstra, 2020) and
the scope and density of their rules have grown, the likelihood that international insti-
tutions have negative externalities for non-members has increased.
Yet, we hold that this trend in declining negative institutional power is not uniform
but varies across states and institutions. Some institutions, such as the UN Security
Council or the IMF, continue to grant materially powerful member states a lot of
negative power. Others, for instance, the EU in monetary aairs or the WTO in its
dispute settlement procedures, grant states scarce negative power. While research on
international authority, the LIO, and its politicization suggests an association between
negative institutional power and institutional contestation, it fails (1) to theorize how
(variation in) negative power impacts on institutional contestation modes and (2) to
empirically study this claim and its underlying mechanisms. In this paper, we address
both these lacunae.
We develop a Negative Institutional Power Theory (NIPT) which suggests that,
ceteris paribus, dierent endowments of negative power, i.e., states’ opportunities to
avoid undesired institutional outcomes, aect how radically they contest the institu-
tion. Our key claim is that the more limited (extensive) the negative institutional
power of dissatised states in an institution, the more radical (moderate) forms of
institutional contestation they will choose. More specically, we argue that the avail-
ability of inside options to prevent undesired developments within institutions as well
as outside options to evade the undesired eects of an institution by leaving it shapes
whether the leaders of dissatised powers opt for voice, subversion, exit, or rollback.
Our argument builds on and contributes to existing institutionalist literature on
the contestation of international institutions. We build on this scholarship by embrac-
ing their fundamental claim that endogenous features of international institutions
are crucial for understanding their contestation (Lipscy, 2017; Zürn, 2018; Börzel &
Zürn, 2021; Dijkstra & Ghassim, 2024; Kreuder-Sonnen & Rittberger, 2023; Debre
& Dijkstra, 2020; Biermann & Daßler, 2024; Kreuder-Sonnen & Zangl, 2024). We
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B. Daßler et al.
advance this literature by theorizing how states’ negative institutional power shapes
the bargaining logic underlying institutional contestation. Contributions by Lipscy
(2017, 2015) as well as Börzel and Zürn (2021) have theorized how states’ positive
power to achieve aects their ability to change institutions and how the absence of
positive power drives their dissatisfaction. Yet even the materially most powerful
states rarely command positive power in international institutions (at all times). Not
all states lacking positive power engage in their contestation; and if they do, they
engage in various contestation modes. The NIPT species how states’ negative power
to avoid undesired institutional outcomes shapes the radicalness of their contestation
modes– regardless of whether their original dissatisfaction stems from institutional
characteristics or has other domestic or international sources (see, e.g., Borzyskowski
& Vabulas, 2019; Choi, 2021; Walter, 2021b; Dijkstra & Ghassim, 2024; Lipps &
Jacob, 2024; Vignoli & Onderco, 2024). A strong negative power endowment of both
inside options to prevent and outside options to evade provides dissatised powers
with a substitute to positive power. Negative power then provides dissatised pow-
ers with a ‘sword’ to push for more desirable institutional outcomes. A more limited
negative power endowment of either inside options to prevent or outside options to
avoid still provides dissatised powers with a ‘shield’ against undesired institutional
outcomes and thus moderates their contestation. Only if dissatised powers lack any
negative power (i.e. have neither inside options to prevent nor outside options to
avoid), will they fully escalate institutional contestation.
The remainder of this paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 distinguishes four
modes of institutional contestation– voice, subversion, exit, and rollback– along two
conceptual dimensions: states’ decision to stay in or leave an institution; and their
decision to actively undermine it or not. Section 3 develops the NIPT and explains
how dissatised powers’ negative institutional power shapes their choice among the
four contestation modes. To assess the empirical plausibility of the NIPT, the paper
combines congruence analyses and structured focused comparisons. Section 4 rst
probes our theoretical expectations within four in-depth case studies of the Trump
Administration’s contestation of the World Bank, the WTO, the Paris Agreement,
and the JCPOA. Section 5 then examines the isolated eect of insides option to pre-
vent and outside options to evade on dissatised powers’ contestation across other-
wise similar cases in four case-pairs. We compare over time the UK’s contestation of
UNESCO, Japan’s contestation of the IWC, Germany’s contestation of the Interna-
tional Energy Agency (IEA), as well as the UK’s post-Brexit contestation of the EU
in the issue areas of migration and nance. Our theoretical expectations are largely
borne out in twelve cases of contestation by four dierent dissatised powers vis-à-
vis eight dierent international institutions: Negative institutional power mattered,
in all of them, for– the chosen modes of– institutional contestation. Yet, extending
our theoretical argument, the case studies also suggest that dissatised powers may
sometimes actively manipulate their opportunities to avoid undesired institutional
outcomes. At any rate, our empirical ndings considerably strengthen our condence
in the internal and external validity of the NIPT. Section 6 therefore concludes that a
focus on negative institutional power advances the study of institutional contestation,
discusses open questions and avenues for future research, and reects on how the
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
current trend towards the erosion of negative power in many international institutions
constitutes a growing peril for the future of the LIO.
2 Conceptualizing institutional contestation modes
Institutional contestation designates state behavior that involves a public attack
against an international institution and poses a political challenge to its authority
(Morse & Keohane, 2014; Urpelainen & van de Graaf, 2015). It thus involves at least
publicly expressed criticism of the institution, combined with demands for institu-
tional change (Zürn, 2018).1 While these demands may relate to procedures, policies,
or principles of an institution and may have a wide variety of domestic or power-
political causes (Kreuder-Sonnen & Zangl, 2016; Börzel & Zürn, 2021; Kruck et al.,
2022; Borzyskowski & Vabulas, 2024a; Lipps & Jacob, 2024) they must fundamen-
tally question an institution’s authority.
States have dierent contestation modes at their disposal. While previous research
on institutional contestation tends to focus on a particular mode of institutional con-
testation2, we integrate and systematize their insights by deriving four contestation
modes from the combination of two conceptual distinctions: A dissatised state must
decide about (1) its further participation, i.e., whether to remain in the respective
institution or to leave it, and (2) its active undermining, i.e., whether to take targeted
measures to impair an institution’s functioning or refraining from suchlike attempts.
Combining these two decisions, we distinguish four modes of institutional contesta-
tion summarized in Fig. 1.
2.1 Voice
If a dissatised state remains within an institution and does not undermine its eec-
tive functioning, it engages in voice (Schmidtke, 2019; Kentikelenis & Voeten, 2021;
Kruck et al., 2022). Contestation remains conned to publicly criticizing the institu-
tion and calling for institutional change. Voice is contestation rhetoric that aims at
bringing about institutional accommodation that makes further escalation of con-
testation unnecessary. To be sure, rhetorical criticism may be erce, and it usually
involves threats to undermine or withdraw from the institution: thus, threatening with
further escalation beyond public criticism is a frequent and important tactic of voice
(see Borzyskowski & Vabulas, 2023; Panke et al., 2024b). Moreover, even materially
powerful states cannot take for granted that threats of escalating contestation will be
taken seriously by other member states and international bureaucracies. Therefore,
dissatised states have strong incentives to engage in tactics, such as publicly prom-
ising domestic audiences that they will withdraw or undermine if their demands are
1 Contestation is dierent from institutional change since whether it actually results in change usually
depends on additional factors, including the stakeholders’ responses and institutional stickiness (see, e.g.,
Mahoney and Thelen (2010), Lipscy (2017), Heinkelmann-Wild and Jankauskas (2022), Borzyskowski
and Vabulas (2023), Hirschmann (2023), Walter (2023), Dijkstra et al. (2025)).
2 Notable exceptions are Börzel and Zürn (2021), Chan (2021), Hirschmann (2020), He et al. (2021),
Dembinski and Peters (2022), Pacciardi et al. (2024).
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B. Daßler et al.
not met, calling for domestic referendums or issuing ultimatums for accommodation
of their demands that are intended to make their threats of escalation credible. After
all, only when states issue credible threats of escalation, they can expect to succeed
in inducing institutional change that accommodates their demands and reduces their
dissatisfaction. But, at least for the time being, the criticizing state stays within the
institution; it complies with key rules, pays its dues to the institution, and does not
reduce its focality by creating of competing institutions or the shifting to them.
2.2 Subversion
If a dissatised state remains within an institution but actively undermines its eec-
tive functioning, it engages in subversion (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010). Subversion is
contestation action that seeks to prevent undesired future policies and outcomes of
the institution from within. Subversion can occur through various tactics, ranging
from blocking decision-making processes, intentionally and systematically violating
institutional norms and rules, forging internal coalitions to force institutional reform
or policy-specic forum shifting, and cutting key nancial, human, or political con-
tributions (see also, Lipps & Jacob, 2024).
Fig. 1 Varieties of institutional contestation and their observable manifestations
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
2.3 Exit
If a dissatised state withdraws from an institution but does not actively undermine
it from outside, it opts for exit (Borzyskowski & Vabulas, 2019; Schmidt, 2024). Exit
is contestation action that aims at avoiding undesired future policies and outcomes
of an institution by moving away from the institution. In this variety of institutional
contestation, the dissatised state does not only voice criticism of the institution but
leaves it in protest against the institutional status quo. At the same time, it refrains
from targeted harmful action against the institution after exit, but simply cuts all ties
to the institution.
2.4 Rollback
If a dissatised state leaves an institution and actively undermines it from outside,
we conceive this as engages in rollback. In this most radical contestation mode, the
dissatised state does not only voice its criticism and withdraws from the contested
institution but continues to erode the institution from outside.3 Rollback seeks to
push back against and weaken the institution from outside to a point where it is
less able to exert any (negative) eects on the leaving state.4 The dissatised power
may do so by unilateral means by threatening other states with sanctions if the later
continue cooperation, or by adopting policy measures that aim at making it impos-
sible for the institution to full its purpose. Rollback may also draw on multilateral
tactics of counter-institutionalization whereby a dissatised state creates alternative
institutions, or shores up its support to existing competitors (Lipscy, 2017; Morse &
Keohane, 2014).
3 Negative institutional power and the choice of contestation modes
This paper develops a Negative Institutional Power Theory that explains states’
choice between these dierent contestation modes regardless of the specic source
of dissatisfaction that makes states contest international institutions. Our theory com-
plements existing accounts, which have focused on explaining why states contest
international institutions. For example, power shift theories point out that relative
gains in power drive rising powers’ contestation when their growing capabilities are
not reected in (increased) institutional privileges whereas the relative decline in
capabilities drives the contestation of established powers as they lose the will and
3 Rollback is thus dierent from counter-institutionalization. Rollback can also include unilateral tactics,
whereas counter-institutionalization is a necessarily multilateral strategy. Moreover, we conceptualize
rollback as withdrawal from the institution and undermining it from outside, whereas counter-institution-
alization does not presuppose leaving the institution.
4 Our conception of “rollback” as a particularly aggressive strategy of contestation that aims at pushing
back against the international institution, weakening it, and thus freeing the contesting state from the
institution’s constraints on pursuing its goals thus resembles at least in some aspects the anti-Communist
“rollback” strategy popularized by US politicians, such as John Foster Dulles in the 1950s and Ronald
Reagan in the 1980s (see Borhi (1999), Stöver (2004).
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B. Daßler et al.
capabilities to sustain international institutions (Zangl et al., 2016; Layne, 2018;
Mearsheimer, 2019; Cooley & Nexon, 2020; Viola, 2020). Domestic politics theories
highlight nationalist, anti-globalization and anti-liberal sentiments within the societ-
ies of Western democratic countries as a cause of institutional contestation (Hawkins
& Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017; Copelovitch & Pevehouse, 2019; Musgrave 2019; De
Vries et al., 2021; Walter, 2021a, 2021b). While these strands of research oer impor-
tant insights into the sources of dissatisfaction and thus why powerful states engage in
institutional contestation, we know much less about the factors that shape how they
contest international institutions– our NIPT closes this gap.
The NIPT applies to materially powerful states that are strongly dissatised with
an institution they are a member of. Only strongly dissatised and materially power-
ful member states have the incentives to contest international institutions because of
their substantial dissatisfaction and the means to employ all contestation modes. The
source of their dissatisfaction can be truly exogenous, such as power shifts or domes-
tic demands, but also endogenous, relating to an institution's fundamental policies
and procedures. What matters for the NIPT is that dissatisfaction reached a level that
makes the state willing to bear the usual material and reputational costs of institu-
tional contestation. Moreover, a state must be a member of the respective institution
and its material power resources must also be sizeable to be able to choose between
all four contestation modes.5
To explain dissatised powers’ choice between contestation modes, we understand
states as boundedly rational actors who pay attention to their costs and benets and
make decisions about contestation modes based on their governments’ assessment of
their expected utility calculations.6 Their initial assessment might of course be imper-
fect and updated over time. Building on institutionalist theories of institutional con-
testation (Lipscy, 2017; Zürn, 2018; Debre & Dijkstra, 2020; Börzel & Zürn, 2021;
Hirschmann, 2021; Kreuder-Sonnen & Rittberger, 2022), we hold that institutional
features shape states’ cost-benet calculations.
More specically, we argue that, ceteris paribus, states’ negative institutional
power shapes their choice between dierent modes of contestation. We refer to nega-
tive institutional power to capture the opportunities an institution grants to states
to avoid undesired institutional outcomes, which contrasts with positive power to
achieve desired institutional outcomes (Dahl, 1957; Cox & Jacobson, 1974; Rus,
1980; Weber, 2019).7 There is a long tradition in IR and the Social Sciences more
broadly that distinguishes between dierent facets and sources of power (see Barnett
& Duvall, 2005). Taking seriously the causal relevance of states’ power to avoid
5 Materially powerful states can not only ‘aord’ to use all four contestation modes, but they can also
‘withstand’ potential retaliation by an institution’s defenders. Smaller states may also be substantially
dissatised but they may be more constrained in their use of (some of) the contestation modes. While
they may be formally able to draw on all contestation modes, their choice is a priori limited as they face
prohibitively high material or reputational costs.
6 The NIPT therefore does not apply to situations where the mode of contestation is triggered by popular
referenda, such as Brexit, its then is not the result of governments’ utility calculations.
7 Note that by negative institutional power we do not mean to imply any normative connotations that
would discredit the possession or use of negative institutional power. Rather, we draw on an established
conceptual distinction between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ power.
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
undesired institutional outcomes, our theory highlights the importance of ‘negative’
power for the explanation of institutional contestation modes. Our conceptualization
thus takes some cues from classic political theorizing on the power to deny (Bachrach
& Baratz, 1962; Lukes, 1974), but species it with institutionalist approaches to the
institutional determinants of states’ power to prevent undesired outcomes (Cox &
Jacobson, 1974; Tsebelis, 2002; Barnett & Duvall, 2005). We thus propose a Negative
Institutional Power Theory which is (1) institution-centered, in that it is concerned
with how institutional properties of the contested institution shape states’ opportuni-
ties to prevent undesired institutional outcomes and thus their choice of institutional
contestation modes; and which is (2) empirical-analytical, in that it allows for falsi-
able hypotheses on the eect of observable sources and uses of negative power.8
Our re-orientation is meaningful because existing research on institutional contes-
tation and change tends to focus on states’ positive power to achieve desired change
(Lipscy, 2015, 2017; Börzel & Zürn, 2021). We do not want to suggest that (lack
of) positive power is unimportant for states’ contestation. But we hold that even the
most materially powerful states often lack the positive power to achieve their goals
within institutions. For instance, even at the heights of its power, the US enjoyed
privileges but rarely commanded the institutional means to unilaterally achieve its
goals in NATO, the UN Security Council, the GATT/WTO, or the Bretton Woods
institutions (Ikenberry, 2001). At the same time, we observe signicant variation in
whether and how the US contested these institutions. We therefore hold that, in the
absence of positive power, negative power will be of utmost importance for explain-
ing states’ choice between contestation modes. Specically, we suggest that states’
inside options to prevent undesired outcomes within institutions and their outside
options to evade undesired eects by leaving the institution condition their choice
of contestation modes (see also, Lipscy, 2015, 2017).9 In the following, we specify
in more detail the distinct institutional features that shape states’ negative power to
prevent or evade undesired outcomes:
International institutions shape states’ inside options to prevent undesired out-
comes within an institution (Koremenos et al., 2001; Jupille et al., 2013; Zürn, 2018;
Barnett & Duvall, 2005). Institutions can grant or withhold member states options
to prevent undesired outcomes in various ways. An institution’s decision-making
rules can provide a dissatised power with formal veto power (Tsebelis, 2002). In
IOs, states may have the right to block undesired procedural or substantive deci-
sions (Blake & Payton, 2015). In agreements, veto power often arises from the rules
governing their extension, modication, or amendment, as well as dispute settlement
8 As such, our understanding of negative institutional power is appropriate for a middle-range theory of
institutional contestation (rather than a universal theory on negative power in all its venues and expres-
sions, see Bachrach and Baratz (1962), Lukes (1974) and more amenable to empirical research and
testing than classic conceptions of negative power, which are not only very generic but also very hard to
observe and empirically study.
9 While Lipscy (2015, 2017) develops an institutionalist bargaining model that combines the (in-)exibil-
ity of institutional rules and states’ outside options to explain success or failure of negotiated institutional
change, we argue that states’ inside options to prevent and their outside options to evade are crucial for
those dissatised states who want to avoid undesired outcomes and therefore consider undermining or
withdrawing from an institution.
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B. Daßler et al.
mechanisms (Koremenos, 2016). States can also enjoy collective veto power if they
can rally a suciently large coalition of states in institutions governed by majority
voting. Powerful states can also command informal veto power due to the indispens-
ability of their contributions to an institution or their closer ties to an IO’s bureau-
cracy, which may keep undesired policies o the table or may reduce costs from
non-compliance by turning a blind eye to their acts of non-compliance (Stone, 2011;
Urpelainen, 2012; Chwieroth, 2014; Dijkstra, 2017).
International institutions also shape states’ outside options to evade undesired
outcomes. When a dissatised power cannot prevent unwanted policies within an
institution, the question whether it could evade them by simply withdrawing from the
institution (or shifting its cooperative activities to pre-existing or newly created alter-
native institutions) becomes pertinent. The eects institutions exert on non-members
are crucial in this regard (Kaul et al., 1999; Mattli, 1999; Kölliker, 2001). Some
institutions entail no eects for outsiders, such as international courts which lack
jurisdiction on non-members. Others yield even positive eects, such as environment
agreements creating public goods also non-members can consume. But some institu-
tions yield negative eects on outsiders by generating costs for them (Gruber, 2000).
For example, multilateral cooperation which takes the form of commodity cartels
has the potential to create signicant costs for non-members which might nd them-
selves defenseless against price increases and reductions in the supply of a respective
commodity. Similarly, free trade agreements can have negative implications for non-
members by creating trade diversion eects at the detriment of institutional outsiders.
An institution’s design, authority, and rules are a crucial determinant of the eects
of the institution even on non-members. Some institutions are designed, empowered,
and regulated in a way that they may promulgate policies that impact outsiders, too,
while others have institutional features that limit their eects to members. To be
sure, an institution’s externalities and states’ vulnerability to them are also aected
by exogenous factors, such as issue area characteristics and preferences. However,
very few goods are natural “collective goods” or “collective bads”, most of them are
regulated or institutionalized as such. An institution’s externalities do not exist in
isolation from its rules that contribute to their creation, extension, and solidication
(Kölliker, 2001).10
Whether and how dissatised powers actually use these institutional opportuni-
ties or not depends on their overall negative power endowments. When dissatised
powers command both inside options to prevent and outside options to evade, they
are in a very good bargaining position vis-à-vis other member states with typically
lesser institutional power (Lipscy, 2015, 2017; von Borzyskowski & Vabulas, 2023).
To be sure, in order to succeed in inducing institutional changes that accommodate
their demands and reduce their dissatisfaction, states in such a position of extensive
negative institutional power still need to make their threats to use that negative power
credible (Sebenius, 1992; Fearon, 1994; Schelling, 1997; Lipscy, 2015; Zangl et al.,
10 A dissatised power may also try to build-up those outside options. States’ vulnerability to the external
eects of legacy institutions is thus also conditioned by the broader institutional context of the relevant
policy eld which in turn shapes the costs for creating institutional alternatives (Lipscy, 2015, 2017). If
policy area characteristics provide a competitive environment where it is easy to build alternative institu-
tions, this provides states with access to (extra) outside options to evade.
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
2016). Rational dissatised powers will usually be aware that reliable information is
scarce in international politics, that bargaining failures are always possible, and that
the often-high costs of undermining and withdrawing from international institutions
may raise doubts among other states that the contestants will actually pursue them.
They will therefore invest considerable eorts in making their threats credible, for
example by voicing strong promises to domestic constituencies. Provided that their
threats to undermine or withdraw from an institution are credible, dissatised powers
that have sucient negative power endowments, i.e., both inside options to prevent
and outside options to evade, do not need to actually act on them because (they can
expect) institutional actors to accommodate their demands and reduce their dissatis-
faction on the basis of mere threats (Faude & Parizek, 2021).
An abundance of negative power thus provides dissatised powers with a substi-
tute for positive power, which they can use as a ‘sword’ to push for more desirable
institutional outcomes within the institution by underscoring their willingness to use
it if their demands are not met. When dissatised powers’ negative power endow-
ments are more limited, voicing threats is not enough to achieve institutional accom-
modation. Dissatised powers must then use their inside options to prevent or outside
option to evade to actively limit the damage they suer from the institution. Since
the institutional power of contesting states and other member states is (more) equal
in this situation, dissatised powers must follow up their threats with contestation
actions (i.e., undermining or withdrawing) that underscore their resolve and aim to
prevent undesirable institutional outcomes in the future.11 As they cannot be certain
that other members will accommodate them, negative power then oers a ‘shield’
against dissatisfying institutional outcomes. When dissatised powers have no inside
options to prevent and no outside option to evade, they have no choice but to escalate
contestation. While strong negative institutional power thus moderates the contesta-
tion by dissatised powers, the lack thereof drives institutional contestation.
Table 1 summarizes the expectations of the NIPT about the combined eect of
inside options to prevent and outside options to evade. Crossing these two variables
results in four congurations of negative institutional power. Each institutional
opportunity structure lends itself, ceteris paribus, to a particular contestation mode.
First, the upper-left constellation of inside options to prevent and outside options
to evade presents a dissatised power with a very benign institutional opportunity
structure and a strong bargaining position vis-à-vis other member states. Making
credible threats of using these ample inside and outside options will allow the dis-
satised state to achieve desired institutional accommodation: the contesting state’s
dissatisfaction will thereby be reduced without the state having to escalate contes-
tation. Its inside options to prevent allows it to avoid highly undesired outcomes
11 This implies that with such contestation action being taken, there is no longer an issue of credible threats,
but the key issue then is bearing the (often) substantial costs of undermining and/or withdrawing.
Inside options to
prevent
No inside op-
tions to prevent
Outside options to evade Voice likely Exit likely
No outside options to evade Subversion likely Rollback likely
Table 1 Dissatised powers’
negative power and contestation
modes
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B. Daßler et al.
from within. What is more, it can credibly threaten to withdraw from the institution,
as it would not suer from any negative externalities stemming from the continued
cooperation of institutional members after its withdrawal or could even free ride on
its positive eects in the case of public good provision by the abandoned institu-
tion. Dissatised powers have no incentives to escalate contestation beyond voicing
criticism, which may include explicit threats of undermining or withdrawal. They
must not fear undesired institutional outcomes because they enjoy inside options to
prevent and attractive outside options to evade. Voice backed up by such strong nega-
tive power makes it unnecessary for contesting states to further escalate contestation
since (they can expect) other member states will accommodate their demands for
change, thereby reducing dissatisfaction. As materially powerful states that possess
both inside options to prevent and outside options to evade are in a good position
to make credible (implicit or explicit) threats of undermining or withdrawing, other
member will realize quickly that the contesting states could block the institution or
just leave it without fearing harm from them. Where the distribution of bargaining
power is so clear, voicing threats is sucient for contesting powers to be taken seri-
ously and for other states to reduce their dissatisfaction by accommodation.12 Hence,
we expect that dissatised powers that have inside options to prevent undesired
outcomes and outside options to evade negative eects from the institution after a
(potential) withdrawal are more likely to choose voice.
Second, the lower-left constellation of inside options to prevent and no outside
options to evade presents dissatised powers with an institutional opportunity struc-
ture that allows them to block undesired outcomes from within, but that would cre-
ate negative eects in case of withdrawal. Their inside options to prevent enable
them to avoid undesired policies or even undermine decision-making more generally.
Withdrawing from the institution would mean to forego these blocking opportunities
within an institution while suering from its negative eects. Dissatised powers
thus face strong incentives to remain within an institution and to draw on their inside
options to prevent undesired policies by undermining its functioning. Voicing threats
of undermining will likely not be sucient: to be sure the contesting state can cred-
ibly threaten to undermine the institution; however, in the absence of outside options
to evade, the other states will understand that the contesting state cannot simply walk
away from the institution without risking that the remaining states make policies
with harmful external eects. The distribution of bargaining power is more balanced
and less clear than in a situation of inside options to prevent and outside options to
evade. This incentivizes a strategy of contestation from within that does not only utter
but carries out threats to underline the contesting states’ resolve. Hence, we expect
that dissatised powers that have inside options to prevent undesired outcomes and
no outside options to evade the negative eects of the institution after a (potential)
withdrawal are more likely to choose subversion.
Third, the upper-left constellation of no inside options to prevent and outside
options to evade makes it dicult for dissatised powers to prevent undesired out-
12 Note that this only holds under the scope condition of materially powerful states. Materially weak states
will often simply have no alternative to voice. For weak states, voice is indeed a weak mode of contesta-
tion.
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
comes from within an institution but allow to achieve satisfactory outcomes outside
the institution. As a dissatised power without inside options to prevent cannot block
undesired outcomes in the institution, its chances to reduce its dissatisfaction within
the institution are thus low. However, in the absence of negative eects, a dissatis-
ed power can achieve satisfactory outcomes outside the institution. The dissatis-
ed power thus faces strong incentives to exit an institution since it cannot prevent
undesired institutional outcomes from within but can free itself from undesired insti-
tutional eects by simply terminating its participation. Voicing threats of exit will
likely not be sucient: the contesting state can credibly threaten to withdraw from
the institution, but the other members will understand that the contesting state would
thereby merely withhold its contribution to institutionalized cooperation but cannot
prevent continued cooperation within the institution. At the same time, withdrawal is
a materially and reputationally costly move for any leaver which will prevent other
members states from making generous concessions ex ante and incentivize them to
take a tough stance in bargaining with the contesting state. Accordingly, the distribu-
tion of bargaining power between the contesting state and the remaining member
states is more balanced and less clear than in a situation of inside options to prevent
and outside options to evade. This induces a strategy of contestation that does not
only utter but carries out threats of withdrawal in order to underline the contesting
states’ resolve and to avoid dissatisfying policies. Hence, we expect that dissatised
powers that have no inside options to prevent undesired outcomes but do have out-
side options to evade negative eects of the institution after a (potential) withdrawal
are more likely to choose exit.
Finally, the lower-left constellation of no inside options to prevent and no out-
side options to evade presents dissatised powers with the most adverse institutional
opportunity structure. Lacking formal veto power and other inside options to prevent,
dissatised powers’ ability to block unwanted outcomes within the institution are lim-
ited. As the institution also exerts negative eects on outsiders, its ability to achieve
desired outcomes outside the institution is also hampered. Dissatised powers thus
have incentives to choose the most radical contestation mode. Since they cannot
prevent undesired institutional outcomes from within, they will withdraw from the
institution; and as negative eects also aect outsiders, they will try to undermine an
institution’s functioning from outside. The contesting state is in a very bad bargaining
position to extract dissatisfaction-reducing concessions and reforms from other mem-
ber states. As the later will recognize that the contesting state’s negative institutional
power is limited, they will take a hard stance and be unwilling to accommodate its
grievances. This all but forces the highly dissatised contesting state to ‘go all-in’ by
leaving the institution and investing the (usually large) resources required to under-
mine it from outside. Escalation to rollback follows from weak negative institutional
power. We thus expect that dissatised powers that have no inside options to prevent
undesired outcomes and no outside options to evade negative eects of the institution
even after (potential) withdrawal are more likely to choose rollback.
To assess our theoretical expectations, we probe the plausibility of the NIPT in
twelve case studies. We employ a mixed-method strategy combining congruence
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B. Daßler et al.
analyses and structured focused comparisons (George & Bennett, 2005).13 In a
rst step, we assess whether the expectations of the NIPT are borne out within four
detailed case studies of institutional contestation by the US under the Trump Admin-
istration. Drawing on a wealth of qualitative data, including ocial documents, pub-
lic accounts, and interviews with involved ocials, we evaluate whether dierent
congurations of the two variables indeed led to the choice of a specic contestation
mode (in an otherwise similar setting).14 In a second step, we assess whether our
two institutional variables make a dierence across cases. We study four pairs of
contextually similar cases in which one of the variables varies (while the other is
constant) to assess its isolated eect on institutional contestation. In other words, we
compare cases that score dierently on the horizonal or vertical axis of Table 1. As
this two-pronged research strategy entails a high threshold of falsication, we hold
that our analysis oers a strong probe of the plausibility of the NIPT. If our theoreti-
cal expectations are borne out within and across these twelve cases, our condence in
the internal and external validity of the NIPT is thus strengthened. Figure 2 outlines
13 Online Appendix A.1 provides a more detailed reasoning and justication of this research design and its
underlying case selection logics. For the eight cases we studied in the second step, we discuss the vary-
ing condition and outcomes within case-pairs in the manuscript and provide details about the respective
second condition that is held constant in Online Appendix A.2.
14 Online Appendix A.3 outlines our interview strategy as well as a list of interviews.
Fig. 2 Institutional contestation by the Trump Administration
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
the selected cases as well as our theoretical expectations about dissatised powers’
contestation modes.
4 Assessing negative institutional power within the Trump
Administration’s institutional contestation
To assess whether negative institutional power mattered for dissatised powers’
choice of contestation modes, we study four cases of institutional contestation by the
US under the Trump Administration. We selected these four cases according to the
four congurations of institutional power which we expect to be associated with dif-
ferent contestation modes: voice, subversion, exit, and rollback. Our analysis of the
Trump Administration’s contestation of the WB, the WTO, the Paris Agreement, and
the JCPOA shows that although the US was substantially dissatised with all four
institutions its contestation varied depending on whether it possessed inside options
to prevent and outside options to evade undesired institutional outcomes.
4.1 Voice: Criticizing the World Bank
The Trump Administration harshly criticized the WB. Secretary of Treasury Ste-
ven Mnuchin called out the WB for its continued high lending to countries which
would obtain “substantial access” to other sources of nance and advised the bank
to “strengthen its focus on outcomes, results, and accountability” (Mnuchin, 2017).
The WB grants the US unique inside options to prevent undesired outcomes within
the organization. The World Bank is in many regards a US-dominated institution
(Clark & Dolan, 2021). To be sure, not even the US has the positive power to achieve
their goals alone in the WB but must build coalitions that usually go beyond the G7
and EU states (Interview WB_MS). Nonetheless, the US is the member with the, by
far, highest voting share in the WB’s main lending facility, the International Bank
for Reconstruction and Development. The US voting share is still sucient to block
any major lending decisions or policies (Faude & Fuss, 2020; Vestergaard & Wade,
2015). Moreover, the US is not only the “shareholder that retains veto power over
changes in the Bank’s structure” (World Bank, 2019), but the US also holds inuence
over the WB’s secretariat. According to a senior WB ocial, “as the largest share-
holder in the World Bank, the US naturally also has inuence, and every president
has to look at how to deal with this” (WB_Secretariat). This inuence is also based
on the US administrations’ close personal ties. Regular and frequent exchange with
the WB bureaucracy provides the US with high institutional control through informal
avenues (WB_Secretariat). The US holds the informal privilege to propose the WB
President, who has always been a US citizen. Moreover, about 25 percent of its sta
are US citizens despite its large and heterogenous membership (Das et al., 2017).
Finally, according to a senior WB ocial, “the proximity to the Capitol, the loca-
tion in Washington, the short distances” contribute to the close relation between the
US and the Bank (WB_Secretariat). As the WB’s bureaucracy enjoys a high degree
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B. Daßler et al.
of bureaucratic autonomy (Bauer & Ege, 2016) and is used to sort out problems in
private (WB_MS), it is also able to accommodate US interests.15
The US also had outside options to evade undesired outcomes in the WB. Rather
than exerting negative institutional eects, the WB would have exerted positive
externalities on the US after withdrawal. Institutionalized cooperation on the issue
of development aid is not associated with any signicant negative eects on states
refraining from cooperation. To the contrary, as the multilateral provision of devel-
opment aid is a typical public good, the US could have taken a ‘free-ride’ on others’
eorts (Mosley, 1985). Turning to bilateral instead of multilateral development aid
would have even allowed the US to pursue its geostrategic interests vis-à-vis China
more assertively by investing in projects that interfered with Chinese interests. Thus,
exit would have been a viable option for the US.
As the NIPT predicts for dissatised powers that command both inside options
to prevent and outside options to evade, the Trump Administration did not have to
make use of its opportunities to withdraw from the WB or undermine its function-
ing but stuck to mere voice. President Trump and members of his administration
uttered two lines of criticism, coupled with demands for institutional changes. First,
the Trump Administration denounced the WB for its lending to China. For example,
in December 2019, Trump claimed that “China has plenty of money. And if they
don’t, they create it. STOP!” (Trump, 2019). US secretary of the treasury Steven
Mnuchin demanded that China should be completely removed from the WB’s loan
programs (Mohsin & Harney, 2019). Second, the US criticized the WB for its alleged
ineciency, nancial waste and lacking commitment to mobilizing private invest-
ment. For example, then-Treasury Secretary for International Aairs, David Malpass
blamed the WB to “spend a lot of money” in a “not very ecient” way (cited in
Lawder, 2018); and Mnuchin called for “further budget discipline” and revised bud-
getary priorities (Mnuchin, 2017).
Further corroborating our argument, the WB Secretariat showed remarkable readi-
ness to accommodate US criticism. The WB Secretariat’s strategy was to “emphasize
your own added value” (WB_Secretariat) to the Trump Administration in several
ways. First, to placate Trump’s criticism regarding the WB budget and in direct
response to its 2017 threat to cut its contributions to multilateral institutions, then-
WB President Jim Yong Kim installed a fund of one billion US Dollars aimed at sup-
porting women’s entrepreneurship which was initiated by Trump’s daughter Ivanka
(Patrick, 2017; Donnan, 2017). The WB– and some of its member states– considered
the Ivanka Fund as an opportunity to improve relations with the Trump adminis-
tration (WB_Secretariat) and to secure US support for the WB’s budget plan. The
Trump Administration’s informal inuence over the WB also becomes apparent in
a second episode. In a meeting in 2018, leaked to the Guardian, WB sta had been
“encouraged by a senior manager to curry favor with the son of David Malpass, who
[…] [later became] president of the World Bank but at the time was serving in the
US Treasury under Donald Trump […] [and] which had played a ‘benecial’ role
in helping the World Bank secure an endorsement for the multibillion-dollar capital
15 For more detailed analyses of the US inuence on World Bank internal processes and policies, see also
Fleck and Kilby (2006), Kilby (2009, 2013), Clark and Dolan (2021), Kersting and Kilby (2021).
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
injection” (Makorto, 2023). A WB senior managers reportedly said that “[w]e have
a prince that is coming, that is joining us, on 16 July [and] I want to forewarn all of
you this young, bright person is the son of the undersecretary of the US Treasury,
which was benecial for us in getting the capital increase […] we [therefore] need
to make him happy and valuable […] [s]o that then I can go to his daddy, and then I
get some bonus points” (Makorto, 2023). Finally, in response to the Trump Admin-
istration’s dissatisfaction with the WB’s new budget plan in 2019, its Secretariat,
in rushing obedience, emphasized that lending to China had already fallen sharply
and declared its intention to eliminate lending when countries, like China, get richer
(Mohsin & Harney, 2019).
Overall, the Trump Administration was “served a bit” by the WB Secretariat to
accommodate its criticism (WB_MS). The Trump Administration, in turn, recog-
nized the “added value” of the bank and “that not everything has been completely
wrong in recent years” (WB_Secretariat). As the US was increasingly satised, it
stopped criticizing the WB in the public.
4.2 Subversion: Undermining the WTO
President Trump and members of his administration voiced erce and fundamental
criticism of the WTO denouncing the organization as biased against the US. For
instance, Trump complained that the WTO’s treatment of China as a developing
nation “leads to tremendous perks and advantages [for China], especially over the
US. […] The WTO is unfair to the US” (Trump, 2018). His criticism of the WTO’s
dispute resolution system was particularly erce: “The World Trade Organization
makes it almost impossible for us to do good business. We lose the cases; we don’t
have the judges. It’s […] bad.” (cited in Miles, 2018)
The US holds inside options to prevent undesired outcomes within the WTO. With
regard to rulemaking, the WTO has a strictly intergovernmental design: its members
negotiate trade agreements and make substantive decisions based on the principle of
consensus (Steinberg, 2002). This provides the US with the formal opportunity to
veto any undesired decision or procedure (WTO_Secretariat1; WTO_MS1). While
this formal veto power does not extend to the adjudication branch of the WTO, which
is organized in a largely supranational manner (Zangl, 2008), the US possess proce-
dural veto power that allows the US to block the nomination of new judges to the
WTO Appellate Body (WTOAB) (Petersmann, 2019).
These formal veto rights are complemented by additional sources of informal veto
power. The US is a key member of the WTO’s informal ‘core negotiation group’
which usually prepares decisions that are then adopted without further negotiations
with remaining member states (Hopewell, 2015; Zangl et al., 2016). A member state
ocial summarized: “One could say that the WTO has a ‘Security Council with one
permanent member’. The US has veto power over everyone. […] Whereas formally
every WTO member has a veto right, this is also theory because not every country
can really maintain a veto for long. […] Only the US has the informal right of veto”
(WTO_MS1). Moreover, the WTO Secretariat is characterized by a “North American
dominance” (WTO_MS1) and “the US has always been […] the godfather of the
system” (WTO_Secretariat2). According to a member state ocial, “[t]he Secretariat
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B. Daßler et al.
never opposes the US. […] There are a lot of Americans and others who are social-
ized in a system in which the US has always been the main pillar. […] All these
people cannot and do not want to imagine a WTO without the US” (WTO_MS1).
Finally, as the by far largest contributor to the WTO’s budget, the US possess addi-
tional leverage over the organization (Baschuk, 2019). According to an WTO ocial,
“on the daily life of the organization, the US […] has the capacity to make the life
of the Secretariat absolutely impossible. And the most sensitive point is, of course,
the budget” (WTO_Secretariat2). In consequence, the WTO ocials “have to be
careful, essentially with the position they take also vis-à-vis the US” (WTO_MS2;
see also, WTO_MS1; WTO_Secretariat1; WTO_Secretariat2). Overall, the US thus
commanded several formal and informal means to prevent undesired policies within
the WTO.
While the US commanded inside options to prevent undesired outcomes within
the organization, it lacked outside options to evade the WTO. While the US could
have freed itself from all undesired WTO obligations by terminating its member-
ship, it would also have lost numerous trading concessions agreed within the WTO
and guaranteed to members through the organization’s most favored nation principle
(World Trade Organization, 2020). Even for a powerful state like the US, the trans-
action costs of going fully bilateral would be steep and there was a real threat that
remaining members could close new multilateral agreements at the detriment of the
US as an outsider (WTO_Secretariat2). As a trade practitioner close to the WTO
emphasized, “leaving the WTO would open the risk of other countries restricting US
trade. […] You lose the stability that the WTO oers. So there’s always that risk. And
it would have created a massive eort on behalf of the US to negotiate treaties with
all these 163 countries. […] The US really needs the WTO. They could not just say
‘we are leaving’” (WTO_Practitioner). Another concern of the US, according to a
senior member state ocial, was that by withdrawing from the WTO, “[t]hey would
only leave space for China to occupy the ground. […] for the international reach of
the US would have been terrible” (WTO_MS3).
As the NIPT expects for dissatised powers which command inside options to
prevent undesired outcomes within an institution but lack outside options to evade
its eects even as an outsider, the Trump Administration opted for a strategy of sub-
version. The US sought to undermine the WTO in a deliberate eort to weaken the
organization as such and erode the eects of undesired WTO policies in several ways.
First, from mid-2017 onwards, the Trump Administration used its veto power to block
the nomination of new judges to the WTOAB. By the end of 2019, the WTOAB was
reduced to one single judge due to the retirement of the remaining judges. With the
appeals stage paralyzed, panel reports could simply be blocked ad innitum by the
losing party’s ling an appeal (Petersmann, 2019; Zaccaria, 2022).
The Trump Administration further weakened the WTO’s dispute settlement sys-
tem by making its December 2019 approval of the 2020 budget contingent on the
cut of funding for the WTOAB, further compromising its operability. Especially the
WTO Secretariat “feared that the US could withdraw overall contributions to the
budget” (WTO_MS3; see also, WTO_Secretariat2). According to a member state
ocial, “[a]fter the US threatened to block the agreement on the budget, they were
appeased. The compromise included, among other things, that the Appellate Body
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
was cut o. So, the Appellate Body only received as much money for the whole year
as was necessary to operate for the rst three months” (WTO_MS1). Notably, even
without the nomination of new judges, the remaining judge of the WTOAB could
have nalized ongoing cases even after their term ended (WTO_Practitioner). But
without sucient funding, the last judge resigned and the WTOAB was disbanded.
In consequence, “there is no binding dispute settlement system […] in the WTO”
(WTO_MS2; see also, WTO_Practitioner).
The negative power the US wielded via the WTO Secretariat became apparent
as the Secretariat refrained from any activities that would have challenged US veto
power. A member state ocial vividly described that “[t]hey sit there like rabbits in
front of a snake and when someone comes along and says: ‘Let’s have a vote, let’s
outvote the US’, these people block it. Then they say: ‘For God’s sake, that would be
the end of our world and we don’t want that and we can’t be part of it’” (WTO_MS1).
When the European Union together with other member states set up a substitute for
the WTOAB, the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA), the
Secretariat shied away from supporting the initiative (WTO_MS3) as “the US ha[d]
been extremely vocal that they did not want to pay for the MPIA. So the budget of the
WTO should not be serving the MPIA” (WTO_Secretariat2). As a member state o-
cial put it: “They knew that the United States under Trump will object. And there was
a risk that they would put in question the budget of the WTO overall” (WTO_MS3).
While working towards paralyzing the WTO’s dispute settlement system, the US
also engaged in national trade policies that diverged from the substantial provisions
of the WTO. By referring to “essential national security interests” and thus invok-
ing an exception enshrined in the GATT agreement on legally dubious grounds, the
Trump Administration imposed taris on steel and aluminum. It has thus pushed a
protectionist trade policy agenda that counteracts the WTO’s key principles.16 As a
result of these various moves of subversion, the Trump Administration’s contestation
of the WTO led to an almost completely deadlocked institution in both rulemaking
and dispute adjudication (Narlikar, 2019; Petersmann, 2019) and put the WTO into a
“position of limbo” (WTO_Secretariat1).
Undermining the WTO from within served US goals to free itself from its binding
dispute settlement. As a senior member state ocial put it: “[I]f they want to go after
China, they prefer not to have a system that is binding and that rules against them.
[…] Therefore, for the US, it is very convenient not to have a dispute settlement. […]
They want to have their leeway” (WTO_MS3; see also, WTO_MS2). By contrast,
the US never tried withdrawing from the WTO. As a member state ocial explained,
“that was too hot for people. […] This can go well, but it can also go very badly. […]
It can fail, even at the last minute, because someone gets in the way. And then we’re
out. […] And then a lot of bilateral agreements would be needed. The US would never
want that. And that is why things happened the way they did. Withdrawal was never
an option” (WTO_MS1). At the same time, the US did not try to push for substantial
reforms under the Trump Administration since it lacked positive power: “Why did
16 After Roberto Azevedo stepped down as Director General, the Trump Administration also used its veto
power to block the appointment of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala who had backing by the majority of the WTO’s
membership (WTO_Secretariat1).
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B. Daßler et al.
they not decide instead to negotiate? They know that negotiating now, for example, to
review subsidies, to review anti-dumping, it will be a dicult call. It will take many
years because China is a member and China will resist, particularly if the changes
are targeted at China, as they will be” (WTO_MS3). Rather, in opting for subversion,
“the US came very quickly to the conclusion […] that we do not need a system that is
binding with China. So let it drift. And we keep our hands free” (WTO_MS3).
4.3 Exit: Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement
President Trump criticized the Paris Agreement on climate change within the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for being “very unfair”
because it “would undermine our economy, hamstring our workers, weaken our sov-
ereignty, impose unacceptable legal risks, and put us at a permanent disadvantage to
the other countries” (Trump, 2017).
In the Paris Agreement, the US lacked inside options to prevent undesired out-
comes within the institution. The US have no special rights within the decision-
making process. As every party to the agreement is free to set their own climate
goals, US lacked any formal inuence over others’ mitigation targets and strategies
and thus “cannot […] unilaterally undo a 194-nation accord that has already been
legally ratied” (Davenport, 2017). Moreover, the Trump Administration lacked
informal inuence over the UNFCCC’s Secretariat. While the US is important for
the global reduction of CO2 and the Secretariat’s budget, the Secretariat has a narrow
mandate and its inuence on substantial policymaking is limited (Widerberg & van
Laerhoven, 2014). According to a senior UNFCCC ocial, while “the secretary’s
traditional role is actually to keep the process going”, its members only have “limited
access to the negotiation rooms” (Paris_UN1). A member state ocial characterized
the Secretariat’s work of assisting member states as follows: “They have to set up
the tools that we have agreed to. They have to prepare the multilateral process […]
to implement and to make sure that the process runs smoothly […]. But they cannot
force a country to do this or that […] It is a neutral secretariat” (Paris_MS1). It can
also be assumed that the Secretariat– even if provided with the opportunity– would
have been unwilling to compromise on its mandate to satisfy the Trump Administra-
tion’s criticism (see also, Paris_MS1). As a senior UN ocial put it, Trump’s criti-
cism in which “the facts and the truth are ignored” contradicts fundamentally with the
UN’s approach to climate change that is “not politically informed, but scientically
informed” (Paris_UN2). Thus, the UNFCCC Secretariat did not constitute a gateway
for US informal inuence.
While the US lacked inside options to prevent undesired outcomes within the Paris
Agreement, it commanded outside options to evade them. The accord does not exert
negative eects on the US after its withdrawal. As the ght against global warming
is a public good, cooperation even has positive externalities on non-members that
can free-ride on remaining parties’ eorts (Zhang et al., 2017). In fact, free-riding by
the US was a main concern among remaining participants and, according to a senior
ocial, it was one of their key objectives to signal the US that “there is nobody else
picking up the responsibility for what we would see as their obligations in terms of
taking their share of the burden” (Paris_MS2). But given the public good character-
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
istics, the US could hardly be excluded from the benets of continued cooperation.
Hence, the Trump Administration’s ability to achieve its goals outside the agreement
was not constrained by the accord.
In line with the NIPT which suggests that dissatised powers which lack inside
options to prevent but have outside options to evade an institution’s undesired eects
will opt for exit, the US chose to exit the Paris Agreement. In June 2017, President
Trump publicly announced his intention to withdraw the US from the accord and in
August, the State Department issued an ocial notice to the UN. While this deci-
sion was only legally enforced in November 2020, with immediate eect “the US
abdicated any role” (Paris_MS3) and kept a “low-prole” (Mathiesen & Jing, 2017)
within subsequent conferences of parties (see also, Paris_MS1; Paris_UN1). The
Trump Administration opted for an “open disengagement with the process based on
voluntary domestic targets and paths of action” (Pavone, 2018) as well as international
commitments to global climate funds (Paris_MS1; Paris_MS4). At the same time, the
US was “not obstructing” climate negotiations after the announcement of withdrawal
according to a senior UNFCCC ocial (Paris_UN1; see also, Paris_MS1): “I did
not see a serious eort sustained over his administration to actually ruin the process.
And certainly, the US can do that in many cases” (Paris_UN1). While the Trump
Administration thus “principally rejected” to be bound by the accord (Paris_MS4), it
has not tried to undermine remaining states’ cooperation within the Paris Agreement
from outside.
4.4 Rollback: Withdrawing from and undermining the Iran Nuclear Deal
The Trump Administration repeatedly expressed its dissatisfaction with the Iran
Nuclear Deal. Under the JCPOA, the ve permanent members of the UN Security
Council (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US), Germany, and the EU agreed in
2015 to lift nuclear-related sanctions from Iran in exchange for veriable limitations
on its nuclear program. Trump characterised the JCPOA as “a horrible one-sided
deal” that was “defective at its core” (cited in The White House, 2018c). The US criti-
cised the JCPOA for being not strict and encompassing enough to curb Iran’s regional
military activities, as its ‘sunset clauses’ allow Iran to resume enriching uranium for
civilian use after 2025 and it lacks any provisions on Iran’s ballistic missiles program
or its support for conict parties in the region (Lantis, 2019).
The US lacked inside options to prevent undesired outcomes in the JCPOA. Any
institutional change to accommodate US demands for a more encompassing agree-
ment beyond the mandate provided by the Security Council required all participants’
consent (JCPOA_MS1).17 Arguably, the US could have tried to undermine the agree-
ment from within by triggering the “snapback process” (UN Security Council Reso-
lution 2231) whereby a member can reinstate UN sanctions unilaterally by issuing a
formal complaint about “signicant non-performance” by Iran. Yet, the International
17 The EU’s High Representative for Foreign Aairs acts as a coordinator for the JCPOA. But its mandate
is restricted to facilitating participants cooperation. And due to its “custodianship” for the agreement, the
EU considers itself as “guardians of the JCPOA” (JCPOA_MS2). The EU was therefore never willing to
compromise on the agreement’s goals (JCPOA_MS1; JCPOA_MS2).
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B. Daßler et al.
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) whose weapon inspectors were charged with moni-
toring Iran’s nuclear activities certied Iran’s compliance at that time and strongly
rejected violation charges by the Trump Administration (IAEA, 2017). This clear
discrepancy, combined with the need to use its veto in the Security Council to prevent
other members from again waiving sanctions against Iran, would have created high
reputational costs for the US according to former National Security Advisor John
Bolton (Bolton, 2020) and would have severely compromised any eorts to negotiate
a “better deal” (The White House, 2018b). Indeed, other signatories of the Iran Deal
considered this option “far-fetched” (JCPOA_MS2), “legally dubious” and “politi-
cally hard to justify” (JCPOA_MS3). The IAEA’s resistance to US pressure to tighten
its certication criteria and be more aggressive in its inspections in Iran also indicates
that the US lacked informal avenues to control the organization (Thompson, 2020).
At the same time, the US also lacked outside options to evade negative eects
from the Iran Nuclear Deal even after leaving the agreement. Ongoing cooperation
by remaining members of the JCPOA conicted with the US goal to force Iran to
accept a stricter, more encompassing agreement. US trade with Iran is only mar-
ginal. Unilaterally terminating economic ties would thus not have been sucient to
mount pressure on Iran (Belal, 2019). The main leverage over Iran under the JCPOA
stemmed from (lifting) sanctions of trade with European countries (JCPOA_MS2;
JCPOA_MS3; Early, 2018). According to an ocial involved in the negotiations
of the JCPOA, “it was clear that the economic kind of momentum would have to
come from Europe, and like-minded countries: Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada.
[…] Nobody ever thought that the US would suddenly buy more Iranian oil or other
things. Of course, the EU was needed in this exercise” (JCPOA_MS1). Hence, the
Trump Administration’s ability to achieve its goals outside the JCPOA was heavily
constrained by the continuity of the agreement.
In line with NIPT expectations, as it lacked inside options to prevent and outside
options to evade, the Trump Administration opted for a strategy of rollback. The
US not only withdrew from the agreement but immediately began to undermine its
functioning. According to other participants, the Trump Administration never seri-
ously tried to resolve its dissatisfaction within the agreement: “[[I]n all this period, it
was always said what Iran should do in addition, there was never any kind of indica-
tion what the US would do in return in addition. And this is a concept which cannot
work in every situation” (JCPOA_MS1). Another ocial conrmed that the Trump
Administration “did not act in the spirit of wanting to use the agreement to achieve a
political eect but […] wanted to undermine it” (JCPOA_MS2). In May 2018, Presi-
dent Trump announced “that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear
deal” (cited in The White House, 2018a). At the same time, President Trump intro-
duced numerous primary and secondary sanctions in his “maximum pressure cam-
paign” in order “to force the regime into a clear choice: either abandon its destructive
behaviour or continue down the path toward economic disaster” (cited in The White
House, 2018a). By introducing secondary sanctions against the remaining parties of
JCPOA, the US aimed at hindering them to deliver on their commitment under the
agreement (Belal, 2019). A senior member state ocial characterized the “maximum
pressure” as “an enormous diplomatic eort by the Americans” (JCPOA_MS2):
“[T]hrough all the embassies around the world, they made people afraid that if they
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
would do anything with regards to trade with Iran, they would get into trouble in
the United States. The ambassador to Germany has even been calling companies
directly” (JCPOA_MS2). This was particularly successful within the private sector
which “was over-complying with US demands even in areas that were not addressed
by sanctions” (JCPOA_MS3). The “frontal attack” of the US against the JCPOA
(JCPOA_MS2) thus did not only constitute a “huge blow” by membership termina-
tion but “continue[d] to create problems” (JCPOA_MS3) after the US withdrawal,
with the US using any chance to demonize the agreement in the UN (JCPOA_MS4).
5 Assessing inside options to prevent and outside options to evade
across cases
To assess whether states’ institutional power endowments make a dierence across
cases, we engage in a structured focused comparison (George, 2019) of four addi-
tional case-pairs: the UK’s contestation of UNESCO in the 1940s and 1980s, Japan’s
contestation of the IWC in the 2000s and 2010s; Germany’s contestation of the IEA
in the 1990s and 2010s; and the UK’s post-Brexit contestation of the EU across the
issue areas of migration and nance. We selected these cases to study the isolated
eect of our two institutional variables (see Fig. 2). While either inside options to
prevent or outside options to evade vary within each case-pair, they are otherwise
very similar. Since the analytical value of the four comparisons rests on whether one
type of negative institutional power and the contestation mode co-vary within case-
pairs, we focus on the description of the actually varying institutional variable and the
contestation mode. To isolate the impact of the respective variable on the outcome,
we hold the second negative institutional power variable constant within the four
case-pairs. But as the choice of contestation mode, according to our NIPT, depends
on the interplay of the two conditions, the Online Appendix provides more detailed
case studies with additional information on the constant condition (see Appendix,
Section A.2).
5.1 The UK’s eroding inside options to prevent in UNESCO: From voice to exit
To assess the expectation about how the availability of inside options to prevent
undesired institutional outcomes aect dissatised powers’ choice to remain within
an institution or withdraw from it, we compare two episodes of the UK’s contesta-
tion of UNESCO during the process of its institutionalization in the 1940s and in
the 1980s (see Fig. 2). While the UK commanded considerable options to prevent
undesired outcomes within the UNESCO during its institutionalization process, these
eroded over time. Since decisions in UNESCO are made by majority vote, the UK’s
formal veto power depends heavily on its ability to rally majorities of member states.
UNESCO’s membership was originally very homogenous and mostly consisted of
Western democracies with aligned interests. The United Kingdom thus exercised
considerable control over UNESCO's agenda in the early years of the organization
(Capello, 1970). The UK’s inside options eroded as UNESCO’s membership changed
over time. Non-Western autocratic states, most prominently the Soviet Union, joined
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B. Daßler et al.
UNESCO in the 1950s, increasing the total number of member states from 99 in
1960. With decolonialization, the number of members reached 159 in 1980. The UK
in turn was no longer able to prevent undesired policies or resource allocations within
UNESCO.
In line with the NIPT, the United Kingdom opted to remain in UNESCO during
early instances of dissatisfaction, but later chose to withdraw from UNESCO. During
the early 1940s, the UK clashed with other member states, most prominently France,
over UNESCO’s intellectual and educational focus and mandate (UK-UNESCO1).
Given its comparatively favorable inside options to prevent, the UK did not consider
withdrawing from the institution but rather engaged in voice. The UK government
publicly highlighted its idea of keeping UNESCO focused on liberal norms and func-
tional exchange of knowledge among member states. The UK’s appeals resonated
with a majority of member states, most notably the US, which in turn voted down the
French proposal to adopt a distinctively normative agenda with explicitly formulated
educational goals and cultural priorities for UNESCO (Capello, 1970). The situation
was dierent when the UK became increasingly dissatised with UNESCO’s poli-
cies in the 1980s (UK-UNESCO2). While the UK government repeatedly demanded
reforms of the organization’s governing bodies, budgetary procedures, as well as
fundamental program issues, the majority of member states did not accommodate
them (Dutt, 1999). Without inside options to prevent undesired developments in
UNESCO, the UK opted to withdraw from the organization. When the then Minister
for Overseas Development, Timothy Raison, justied the UK’s exit from UNESCO
before the House of Commons, he particularly stressed the policies pushed through
by a majority formed by the Soviet Union and the ‘Third World’ including radical
initiatives against a free press and human rights.
5.2 Japan’s eroding inside options to prevent in the IWC: From subversion to
rollback
We also assess the expectation of the NIPT that the availability of inside options to
prevent aects dissatised powers’ choice to remain within an institution or with-
draw from it by comparing two episodes of Japan’s contestation of the IWC, i.e. in
the 1980s up to the 2000s and from the 2010s onwards (see Fig. 2). Japan initially
possessed substantial inside options to prevent dissatisfying outcomes within the
IWC. For instance, Japan could unilaterally submit a protest note that eectively
canceled its obligations under IWC policies. Moreover, since major decisions in the
IWC required a three-quarters majority, Japan was in a good position to work with
other pro-whaling countries to prevent overly “conservationist” policies (Strand &
Tuman, 2012; Wissmann & Wollensak, 2020). By the 2010s, however, Japan's inter-
nal options had diminished. The number and assertiveness of anti-whaling states in
the IWC had grown to the point where they could outvote Japan's coalition, and the
IWC’s focus increasingly shifted from regulating commercial whaling to ending it
(Kolmaš, 2021).
As the NIPT would suggest, the loss of inside options to prevent was associated
with Japan’s choice to no longer remain within the IWC but to withdraw its member-
ship. In the 1980s to 2000s, Japan engaged in subversion (Japan-IWC1). It repeat-
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
edly used its veto power to avoid stricter interpretations of whaling for “scientic
purposes” to an extent that eectively undermined the IWC’s purpose of preserving
whales. Japan also fostered collaboration among pro-whaling states, encouraging an
extensive approach to “scientic” whaling in other countries that challenged IWC
principles and strongly subsidized its shing industry (Eldar, 2008; The Asahi Shim-
bun, 2021). Even as the IWC’s membership had increasingly turned anti-whaling
from the 1970s, Japan was still able to defend its blocking power by paying small
island states to join the organization and vote in its favor industry (Eldar, 2008; The
Asahi Shimbun, 2021). However, as Japan’s inside options increasingly eroded in the
2010s, its government eventually escalated contestation to rollback (Japan-IWC2).
Without the power to block dissatisfying developments and with its most recent pro-
posal to create a “Sustainable Whaling Committee” rejected by a majority of mem-
bers (Barnett, 2018), Japan withdrew from the IWC in 2019. As the organization
continued to exert negative eects on Japan, it further opted to undermine the IWC
from outside.18 Japan not only expanded subsidies for its domestic whaling industry
but also pushed for the (re-)legalizing commercial whaling by shoring up its support
for the pro-whaling North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMC) and
initiating an international agreement on commercial whaling (Suga, 2018; Matsu,
2018; The Asahi Shimbun, 2021).
5.3 Germany’s increasing outside options to evade the IEA: From subversion to
voice
Turning to dissatised powers’ availability of outside options to evade undesired
institutional outcomes, we compare two episodes of Germany’s contestation of the
IEA in the late 1990s/ early 2000s and 2010s (see Fig. 2). While Germany wanted
to reduce its dependence on fossil and nuclear energy sources and shift to renewable
energy, the IEA’s policy focus remained limited on nuclear energy and fossil fuels
(Urpelainen & van de Graaf, 2015). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Germany
lacked outside options to evade the IEA. As the IEA was the focal organization for
international energy policy and only few pioneer states shared Germany’s interest in
promoting energy transition from fossil to renewable sources, multilateral coopera-
tion outside the organization was prohibitively costly. Moreover, at that time, Ger-
many was heavily dependent on oil and gas imports from IEA member states (Hake
et al., 2015), which further increased the costs of creating an institutional outside
option with an explicit focus on renewables as this would have risked conict with
major suppliers.
Since the start of the coalition governments of the German Social Democrats and
the Green Party in 1998 at the latest, Germany was determined to push for a stron-
ger focus on renewable energies within or outside the IEA (Röhrkasten & Westphal,
2013). Confronted with a lack of outside options, in the late 1990s, Germany suc-
18 At least after the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling, it was clear that the IWC would exert nega-
tive eects on Japan even as an outsider. While whaling outside states’ own waters was prohibited, Japan
as a member could alleviate criticism by referring to the scientic purpose of its whaling program. As an
outsider, Japan could no longer draw on this loophole and would have to face even ercer criticism and
sanctions, see e.g. Catalinac and Chan (2005), Kolmaš (2021), Fobar (2018).
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B. Daßler et al.
cessively began to engage in a strategy of subversion vis-à-vis the IEA (Germany-
IEA1). More precisely, throughout the 1990s and against the erce resistance of, inter
alia, the pro-nuclear IEA members France, Canada, Australia, Japan, UK, and the US,
Germany pro-actively engaged in forging coalitions with other IEA member states to
push for an expansion of renewable energy cooperation while blocking IEA attempts’
to rearm its commitment to nuclear energy (Röhrkasten & Westphal, 2013). While
attempts to actively promote a focus on renewables remained largely unsuccessful
due to the reluctance of many states which feared the high political and economic
costs of a transition towards renewable energy (Scheer, 1993; Röhrkasten & West-
phal, 2013). However, Germany managed, together with a newly forged coalition of
states in favor of renewable energy cooperation, to undermine the IEA’s nuclear and
fossil energy agenda by aggressively blocking IEA’s initiatives on nuclear and fos-
sil energy promotion and trying to “alter the IEA’s internal governance structures”
(Urpelainen & van de Graaf, 2015: 813).
With the signicant structural changes that took place in global energy governance
in the early and mid-2000s, the tide turned in favor of the German energy transi-
tion agenda. More specically, virtually all renewable energy industries grew signi-
cantly as the global demand for renewable energy technologies grew, even among
states that were initially reluctant to create alternative renewable energy institutions.
More and more states became interested in international cooperation on renewable
energy. Thus, by the 2010s, Germany’s institutional outside options to evade became
credible and feasible. Together with a coalition of 75 like-minded states, in 2009 Ger-
many created an institutional outside option with the International Renewable Energy
Agency (IRENA). They were quickly joined by many other countries with a newly
gained interest in the promotion of renewable energy. With the now available insti-
tutional outside option, Germany found itself in an improved position to evade the
policies of the IEA. In line with the NIPT, after IRENA became operational in 2011,
Germany stopped undermining the IEA as it had gained outside options to evade
undesired outcomes on top of its inside options to prevent undesired outcomes in the
IEA. Since the 2010s, Germany has refrained from undermining the IEA and merely
engaged in voice (Germany-IEA2). Also in line with the expectations of NIPT, Ger-
many’s criticism of the IEA’s neglect of renewable energy was eventually accommo-
dated by the IEA as the IEA broadened its core policy agenda beyond energy security
dened in terms of oil and began to promote renewable energy production (Downie,
2020). While this case-pair broadly supports our NIPT, it also suggests an impor-
tant extension of our theory: States can manipulate and help bring about institutional
opportunity structures that provide them with options to evade undesired outcomes.
In other words, not only structurally given negative power endowments matter, but
dissatised states can also (re-)shape them through strategic action that creates (addi-
tional) outside options.
5.4 The UK’s varying options to evade EU eects after Brexit in migration and
nance: Exit and rollback
We assess the expectation of the NIPT that the availability of outside options to evade
impacts dissatised powers’ choice to undermine an institution or not by comparing
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
the UK’s behavior vis-à-vis the EU after Brexit across the issue areas of migration
and nance (see Fig. 2). To be sure, our objective is not to explain Brexit, but to
study the UK governments subsequent decision to undermine the EU or not.19 The
UK’s ability as an outsider to evade negative eects from the EU vary across issue
areas. While the UK commanded ample outside options to evade the EU in migra-
tion, these were more limited in nance. EU migration policies did not constrain the
UK’s ability to unilaterally control the migration ows crossing its borders. Rather
than negatively aecting the UK, the government could even hope that the EU’s more
liberal migration policies would attract migration ows away from the UK (Portes,
2021). Thus, through its withdrawal from the EU, the UK was able to address the
major points of dissatisfaction emphasized by the Brexit campaign with regard to
the EU’s migration regime, facing no longer the perceived negative eects of EU
migration policies (Foteini & Markozani, 2020; Schwartz et al., 2021). By contrast,
the UK lacked similar outside options in nance. Indeed, as an outsider, the UK
faced signicant negative eects, such as increased competition from the nancial
services markets of the remaining EU member states, which, in contrast to the more
isolated UK nancial services market, would benet from signicant network eects
(Di Noia, 2001). After Brexit, the City of London was therefore confronted with sig-
nicant competitive pressure from the remaining member states who could draw on
their advantageous position due to their access to the Common Market and redirect
capital from the City to the EU (Wilson & Callanan, 2021). The UK as a nancial hub
has lost sizable shares of euro interest rate swap trading to euro area centers due to
European authorities’ eorts to move euro-denominated nancial activities closer to
the euro area (Demski et al., 2022); and many nancial services jobs were relocated
to other EU nancial centers (Hall & Heneghan, 2023). Overall, while the full impact
of Brexit will continue to unfold over time, it is clear that the UK has faced signicant
negative consequences as a nancial center since becoming an outsider to the EU.
In line with the NIPT, the UK opted for undermining the EU in nance while
it did not undermine the EU in migration after Brexit. In migration, the UK opted
against undermining the EU after its exit (UK-Post-Brexit1). As an outsider, its dis-
satisfaction with the EU’s migration policy was resolved by leaving the EU (Foteini
& Markozani, 2020). By contrast, the UK government’s dissatisfaction with the EU
in nance even increased after Brexit. The UK therefore chose to undermine the EU
by engaging in rollback (UK-Post-Brexit2). In an active attack on EU’s regulatory
goals, the UK started a “race to the bottom” to consolidate or build new partnerships
in the nancial services (Morales & Brush, 2021). The government has also started to
openly diverge from EU nancial regulations in some areas, aiming to make London
more competitive vis-à-vis its EU competitors for instance through changes to listing
rules and the exploration of crypto-asset regulation (UK Parliament, 2022). The UK
also passed capital market reforms, which further aim at bolstering the City of Lon-
19 Explaining Brexit is indeed beyond the scope of the NIPT since the UK’s decision to withdraw from the
EU was driven by a popular vote and not a strategic choice by the government. This very feature allows
us to separate the usually intertwined decisions to withdraw from an institution or not and to undermine
it or not.
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B. Daßler et al.
don to the disadvantage of nancial centers in the EU member states and EU nancial
regulation (Véron, 2021).
6 Conclusion
International institutions are increasingly contested by their member states. In turn,
a growing body of research studies why states engage in institutional contestation
and highlights dierent sources of states’ dissatisfaction– from geopolitical (Zangl
et al., 2016; Layne, 2018; Mearsheimer, 2019; Cooley & Nexon, 2020; Viola, 2020)
to domestic (Hawkins & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017; Copelovitch & Pevehouse, 2019;
Musgrave, 2019; De Vries et al., 2021; Walter, 2021a, 2021b) and institutional (Lip-
scy, 2017; Zürn, 2018; Börzel & Zürn, 2021; Biermann & Daßler, 2024; Dijkstra &
Ghassim, 2024; Goddard et al., 2024; Heinkelmann-Wild et al., 2024). This paper
advances this literature by analyzing how the negative institutional power of dissat-
ised states shapes the modes of their institutional contestation. While research on
international authority, the LIO, and its politicization suggests an association between
negative institutional power and institutional contestation, it fails (1) to theorize how
(variation in) negative power impacts on institutional contestation modes, and (2) to
empirically study this claim and its underlying mechanisms. In this paper, we address
both these lacunae.
Our Negative Institutional Power Theory (NIPT) suggests that institutional oppor-
tunities to avoid undesired outcomes inside or outside an institution are key to under-
standing the choice of contestation modes by powerful member states. According to
the NIPT, states’ inside options to prevent undesired outcomes within the institution
as well as 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. Assessing the NIPT within and across twelve
cases of institutional contestation lends support to our expectation that institutional
opportunities to avoid undesired outcomes inside or outside an institution aect dis-
satised powers’ choice of contestation mode (see Table 2). The four case studies of
institutional contestation by the Trump Administration, leveraging interviews with
participants as well as ocial statements and documents, ensure a high level of inter-
nal validity. Our condence in the NIPT is strengthened by the fact that the dierent
congurations of the two variables– inside options to prevent and outside options to
evade– are associated with the choice of voice, subversion, exit, or rollback in line
with our theoretical expectations. Moreover, the fact that we nd support for our
Inside options to prevent No inside options to prevent
Outside
options to
evade
• US-World Bank: voice
• UK-UNESCO1: voice
• DEU-IEA2: voice
• US-Paris agreement: exit
• UK-Post-Brexit1: exit
• UK-UNESCO2: exit
No outside
options to
evade
• US-WTO: subversion
• Japan-IWC1: subversion
• DEU-IEA1: subversion
• US-JCPOA: rollback
• Japan-IWC2: rollback
• UK-Post-Brexit2: rollback
Table 2 Results of the twelve
case studies
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How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
theoretical expectations in case studies covering eight dierent international institu-
tions (the EU, the IEA, the IWC, the JCPOA, the Paris agreement, the UNESCO,
the World Bank, and the WTO), four dierent materially powerful states (Germany,
Japan, the UK, and the US), diverse sources of dissatisfaction ranging from ideology
and mass politics to economic interest groups and governmental reform agendas as
well as various points in time, ranging from the 1950s to the 2020s, corroborates our
condence in the external validity of our results. We are thus condent that the NIPT
can explain the institutional contestation modes of dissatised powers in very dier-
ent settings and periods.
Yet, our empirical analysis also points to potential specications of our theory and
some open questions for future research. First, evidence especially in the Germany-
IEA case studies, suggests that institutional opportunity structures that constitute par-
ticular negative power endowments may not (fully) be structurally determined but
can be amenable to shrewd manipulation by dissatised powers. Acknowledging the
(potential) agency of dissatised powers in (re-)shaping options to avoid undesired
institutional outcomes raises the important follow-up questions of when states will
(more likely) manage to do so and, more broadly, how strategic and forward-looking
states are in designing negative power arrangements in international institutions. This
insight also opens up promising avenues for future research, such as exploring how
states actively manipulate their negative institutional power, potentially creating a
dynamic interplay between institutional design and contestation strategies.
A second issue for future research is to expand on, and delve deeper into, dif-
ferent sources of states’ negative power. Putting negative power on the agenda of
institutionalist approaches to the contestation of international institutions, we have
focused on institutional determinants of negative power, which are relatively easy
to observe. A broader perspective on negative power (see Bachrach & Baratz, 1962;
Lukes, 1974) might also study more tacit non-institutional, e.g. ideological, sources
of negative power. A third avenue for future studies would be to explore, in qualita-
tive or quantitative research, the interaction of institutional determinants of states’
choice of contestation modes with other drivers of contestation, such as domestic
politics or global power shifts. Additionally, investigating how non-state actors’ con-
testation strategies are inuenced by their (lack of) negative institutional power could
yield valuable insights, expanding the scope of the NIPT beyond state actors.
Finally, while the NIPT’s plausibility has been corroborated in twelve cases across
very dierent settings, and the theory has thus passed a meaningful threshold of
falsication, our empirical analysis does not constitute a rigorous test, yet. Future
research could test our argument in ‘hard cases’ where a specic contestation mode
appears determined by other factors than negative institutional power. Such hard
cases could be instances where escalation is very (un-)likely for reasons other than
institutional properties, for example when inuential domestic constituencies within
a member state strongly push for the escalation (or moderation) of institutional con-
testation. Through process tracing analysis, researchers could try to unpack whether
governments’ institutional power endowment still made a dierence for their choice
of institutional contestation modes under these circumstances. Future research could
also compile a dataset of dierent types of institutional contestation (see also, Dijks-
tra & Ghassim, 2024) and assess the NIPT statistically. In doing so, researchers could
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B. Daßler et al.
also test– and potentially expand– the scope of our argument by including data not
only on materially powerful but also weak states.
Notwithstanding this need for further research, our results, as they stand, indicate
that research on the contestation of international institutions should pay more atten-
tion to their features, rst and foremost states’ opportunities to avoid undesired insti-
tutional outcomes. At least for highly dissatised and materially powerful states and
ceteris paribus, the NIPT suggests that the possession of negative institutional power
will moderate states’ contestation of the international institution. By contrast, a lack
of inside options to prevent undesired outcomes or outside options to evade them will
lead to their escalation of contestation.
The NIPT thus has the important implication that the current trend of increasing
contestation of the LIO by both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ (Lake et al., 2021) might
well continue in the future. Rising powers are likely to escalate institutional contes-
tation as their inside options to prevent dissatisfying institutional outcomes are still
limited while they are exposed to an ever higher level of institutional authority and
concomitant external eects (Zürn et al., 2012; Zürn, 2018; Kreuder-Sonnen & Ritt-
berger, 2023). Established powers in turn are likely to escalate institutional contesta-
tion to the extent that they must sacrice institutional control to accommodate rising
powers. As placating both rising and established powers at the same time is hard to
do, the conict between rising and established powers over institutional control has a
high potential of driving future contestation of the LIO.
Still, the NIPT also yields reasons for cautious optimism and suggests political
opportunities to change the fate of contested institutions and the broader LIO. Our
theory shifts the perspective from sources of contestation that are dicult to change
for international actors, such as domestic politics and geopolitics, to institutional fac-
tors that can be reformed by the membership of international institutions and also IO
bureaucracies. Granting powerful member states formal or informal opportunities to
block undesired outcomes promises to moderate dissatised states’ contestation. Simi-
larly, eorts by member states and IO bureaucracies to limit the eects of international
institutions to their members might help to avoid the escalation of institutional con-
testation. While both, granting dissatised member states internal options to prevent
and oering them outside options to evade through institutional reforms may come
with losses in institutional eectiveness and eciency, both reform strategies should
help protect institutional cooperation by taming institutional contestation. At any rate,
understanding how negative institutional power shapes member states’ contestation of
international institutions is vital to promote the resilience of international institutions
in times of heightened dissatisfaction with specic institutions and the broader LIO.
Supplementary information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.
org/10.1007/s11558-024-09574-z.
Acknowledgments We thank the anonymous reviewers and the Editor of The Review of International
Organizations for very helpful comments. For feedback on earlier versions of this article, we are grate-
ful to Florian Böller, Maria Debre, Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Caroline Fehl, Orfeo Fioretos, Gisela
Hirschmann, Raphaela Hobbach, Vytautas Jankauskas, Christian Kreuder-Sonnen, Lisa Kriegmair, Tobias
Lenz, Andrea Liese, Diana Panke, Berthold Rittberger, Henning Schmidtke, Laura Seelkopf, Lora Viola,
Inken von Borzyskowski, Bernhard Zangl as well as participants of conference panels and colloquia in Ber-
lin, Bonn, Heidelberg, Munich and Tennessee. We thank Nadia el Ghali for excellent research assistance.
1 3
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
How negative institutional power moderates contestation: Explaining…
Author contribution Author contributions to theory-building, research design and conceptualization: B.D.
(33%), T.H.W. (33%), A.K. (33%); empirical analysis: B.D. (33%), T.H.W. (33%), A.K. (33%); writing:
B.D. (33%), T.H.W. (33%), A.K. (33%). The order of authors is chosen alphabetically.
Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
Data availability The data that support the ndings of this study are not publicly available due to privacy
and ethical restrictions since they contain information that could compromise the guaranteed privacy of
research participants. The data may be made available from the corresponding author upon reasonable
request and with permission of the authors’ institution’s ethical review board.
Declarations
Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use
is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission
directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
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Authors and Aliations
BenjaminDaßler1· TimHeinkelmann-Wild1· AndreasKruck1
Andreas Kruck
andreas.kruck@gsi.uni-muenchen.de
Benjamin Daßler
benjamin.dassler@gsi.uni-muenchen.de
Tim Heinkelmann-Wild
tim.heinkelmann-wild@gsi.uni-muenchen.de
1 Department of Political Science, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Oettingenstr. 67,
80538 Munich, Germany
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