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Delegation and pooling in international organizations

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Abstract

We conceive authority of an international organization as latent in two independent dimensions: delegation by states to international agents and pooling in collective decision making bodies. We theorize that delegation and pooling are empirically as well as conceptually different. Delegation is an effort to deal with the transaction costs of cooperation which are greater in larger, broader, and correspondingly more complex organizations. Pooling reflects the tension between protecting or surrendering the national veto. This paper theorizes that delegation and pooling are constrained by two basic design features: a) the scope of an IO’s policy portfolio and b) the scale of its membership. We test these hypotheses with a new cross-sectional dataset that provides detailed and reliable information on IO decision making. Our major finding is that the design of international organizations is framed by stark and intelligible choices, but in surprising ways. Large membership organizations tend to have both more delegation and more pooling. The broader the policy scope of an IO, the more willing are its members to delegate, but the less willing they are to pool authority.

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Notes

  1. General purpose IOs tend to have more delegation, while task specific IOs tend to have higher pooling (Hooghe et al. forthcoming; Lenz et al. 2014).

  2. The distinction is foreshadowed by the legalization (Abbott et al. 2000) and rational design projects (Koremenos et al. 2001). Abbott and Snidal (1998: 8f) use the concept of centralization to refer to “a concrete and stable organizational structure and a supportive administrative apparatus” while independence refers to “the authority to act with a degree of autonomy, and often with neutrality, in defined spheres.” These attributes have an affinity with our concept of delegation. Koremenos et al. (2001) identify five elements of institutional design: membership rules, scope of issues, flexibility, centralization of tasks, and rules for controlling the institution. The final two overlap with delegation and pooling. Centralization refers to activities “to disseminate information, to reduce bargaining and transaction costs, and to enhance enforcement . . . The least intrusive form of centralization is information collection” (Koremenos et al. 2001: 771–72). Control “focus[es] on voting arrangements as one important and observable aspect of control” (Koremenos et al. 2001: 772).

  3. Recent studies that distinguish pooling and delegation beyond the European Union include Rittberger and Zangl (2006), Brown (2010), and Lenz et al. (2014).

  4. Even ratification has been made less restrictive. Since 1972 the IMO routinely uses the tacit consent procedure whereby a member state is presumed to have ratified unless it objects within a set time period. The new rule was introduced because reaching the two-thirds hurdle became increasingly difficult as membership expanded beyond the initial group of shipping nations (Rosenne 1999).

  5. Two case studies speak to the issue. Pahre (2004: 128) finds that the more players involved in trade negotiation, the more they cluster in groups, and interprets this as support for the hypothesis that larger membership leads to centralization. However, clustering, defined as “a state’s simultaneous negotiations with two or more countries on the same issue” (Pahre 2004: 101), is at best a weak form of centralization and one would be hard-pressed to conceive it as a form of delegation. Richards’ study of the air-traffic regime in the same volume observes that growth in membership has led to less centralization and more “unanimity voting rules govern[ing] annual IATA fare conferences” (Richards 2004: 235, 240–1, 255–6).”

  6. We investigate the formal rules and then determine whether these are translated into institutions in order to narrow the gap in coding between unrealized intention and actual practice (Gray and Slapin 2012; Haftel 2013). However, we do not code practices that have only an informal basis.

  7. As distinct from delegation in dispute settlement, which requires separate treatment.

  8. Delegation is calculated as a summated rating scale ranging from 0 (no delegation) to 9 (maximum delegation) by adding scores across these items, then rescaled from 0 to 1. Please see the online appendix on the webpage of Review of International Organizations for details.

  9. Pooling is calculated for each domain as a function of the decision rule, bindingness, and ratification. The “weakest link”—the most intergovernmental option—prevails. The maximum score is majority voting over a binding decision that does not require ratification. The minimum score is unanimous decision making. Discounts are applied to non-unanimous decisions that are partially binding or non-binding or require partial or full ratification. Super-majoritarian decision rules, partial ratification, and partial bindingness produce intermediate scores. Scores are calculated for each domain and summated on a scale from 0 (no pooling) to 6 (maximum pooling), then rescaled to 0 to 1.

  10. Krippendorff’s (2013) alpha measures agreement among coders and ranges from zero, which indicates no agreement beyond chance, to one, which indicates agreement without exceptions.

  11. The commonly used POLITY2 measure from the Polity IV dataset, which subtracts the autocracy score from the democracy score, is highly correlated at the IO level (r = 0.95) and produces similar results.

  12. A counterargument focuses on major powers as suppliers of international institutions (Hancock 2009; Mattli 1999; Mearsheimer 1994).

  13. Examples of the former are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Examples of the latter are the International Atomic Energy Agency (where the ten largest nuclear powers have reserved seats), the United Nations (with reserved seats for the five big powers) and the International Maritime Organization (with reserved seats for the countries with the largest shipping interests).

  14. Controlling for preference heterogeneity among member states has no effect. The only published data source covering the IOs discussed here is the Affinity Index which extracts similarity scores from voting in the United Nations. This is a topic on which valid hypothesis testing must await improved measurement (Voeten 2013).

  15. Niger and Guinea (2009), Ivory Coast (2012), Mali (2011).

  16. Members and Policy scope are quite strongly associated (r = −0.55). In the online appendix we confirm the results of the OLS models presented here in sequential matching models (Ho et al. 2007; Holland 1986). Matching allows one to examine the effects of predictors that are highly correlated by weighting cases to achieve better balance between treated and control groups.

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Acknowledgments

This project is financed by the European Research Council Advanced Grant #249543 “Causes and Consequences of Multilevel Governance.” The dataset was created by Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, Jeanine Bezuijen, Besir Ceka, Svet Derderyan, and Tobias Lenz. Emanuel Coman, Catherine de Vries, Benjamin Neudorfer, and Henk-Jan Van Alphen provided research assistance at various stages. Earlier versions were presented at the Hertie School, Berlin; the Free University of Berlin; the 2012 Council of Europeanists, Boston; Munich University; New York University; Nuffield College, Oxford University; the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; the Munk Centre, University of Toronto; the VU University Amsterdam; the ETH in Zurich; and the 2014 International Studies Association, Toronto. The authors are grateful for participant comments at these seminars and for individual comments on various drafts. We wish to thank Thomas Bernauer, Tanja Börzel, Eugenia da Conceicao-Heldt, Mark Crescenzi, Ben Crum, Catherine de Vries, Philipp Genschel, Stephen Gent, Gary Goertz, Yoram Haftel, Markus Jachtenfuchs, Judith Kelley, Christiane Lemke, Tobias Lenz, David Levi-Faur, Walter Mattli, Helen Milner, Ron Mitchell, Kimberly Morgan, Kalypso Nicolaidis, Diana Panke, Nils Ringe, Thomas Risse, Berthold Rittberger, Frank Schimmelfennig, Duncan Snidal, Theresa Squatrito, Erik Voeten, Bernhard Zangl, Michael Zürn, and the anonymous referees. We wish to give special thanks to Emanuel Coman for research assistance and to the Kolleg-Forschergruppe ‘The Transformative Power of Europe’, and its co-directors Tanja Börzel and Thomas Risse, for hosting us as postdoctoral fellows.

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    Liesbet Hooghe & Gary Marks

  2. VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Liesbet Hooghe & Gary Marks

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Hooghe, L., Marks, G. Delegation and pooling in international organizations. Rev Int Organ 10, 305–328 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-014-9194-4

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