Abstract
Principal-agent analyses of delegation to international organizations have advanced our understanding of international cooperation through institutions. However, broader tests of why and when states delegate are not possible without a clear means for objectively identifying and measuring delegation. This paper develops a metric for delegation based upon the services the agent provides to its principals and the resources and autonomy it has to provide those services. This numerical metric is continuous and generalizable to a wide variety of principal-agent relationships. This paper then demonstrates the face validity of the measure with case studies of delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The paper concludes with a test of Realist and Institutionalist hypotheses for cooperation using the delegation metric, demonstrating the complexity of the underlying reasons we observe delegation.
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Notes
Legalization has occurred when actors regularize relations with obligation, precision, delegation, or some combination and degree of any of the three (Abbott et al. 2001).
In an early application of delegation theory to IR, Pollack (1997) creates a ratio of “treaty provisions delegating executive powers” to “total provisions in the issue chapter” to measure delegation by European states to the European Commission.
Koremenos (2008) describes a more exhaustive differentiation of legalized delegation and a data collection process from treaty texts.
Martin (2006) measures delegation to the IMF by tracking changes in internal conditionality procedures, treatment of confidential information, and use of preconditions the staff requires a state to make before a program will be presented for approval.
Gleditsch and Ward observe that only 1.16% of all possible Polity score combinations are actually observed (Gleditsch and Ward 1997).
Exogenous changes in costs can create incentives to renegotiate existing contracts.
Hawkins and Jacoby (2008) describe access by third-parties to the policy-making process of an IO as “institutional permeability,” whereas “permeability” is used here to refer specifically to the ability of actors other than the collective principal to influence staff appointments (below).
“Monitoring is the process of gathering information… Verification is the use of information to make a judgment about the compliance of parties” (Boulden 2000, 45).
Many dispute the enforcement powers of IOs and I focus here on enforcement powers (an authority) as distinct from enforcement power (an effect). The effect of recommended or compulsory sanctions may be greater, and more coercive, but presents a second-order enforcement problem. Enforcement authority is greater if the agent can punish noncompliance without requiring the positive action of other actors.
Formal voluntary contributions to the IAEA routinely amount to 10% or more of the Regular Budget. Most IOs, though, do not report monetary contributions with sufficient reliability for inclusion into the measure. They are also often unable (or unwilling) to price cost-free experts, equipment, training and other non-monetary assistance.
Control over staffing may also target domestic constituencies. Many states, especially poorer and less developed ones, justify the expense of IO membership by providing relatively high-paying positions to domestic supporters, essentially international patronage politics.
A two-thirds threshold is used because it is difficult to determine the exact number of seconded staff at an IO; both the IOs and the host governments face incentives to hide the relationship to avoid the appearance of bias (interviews with IAEA and UNSCOM officials). Further, almost all IOs will make some use of seconded staff, even if on a short-term basis as external contractors to train staff or provide other consulting services (interviews with IAEA and OPCW officials).
Thompson (2006) highlights an interesting dilemma with UNSCOM, relative to UNMOVIC, in which an IO relying extensively on seconded staff may actually have access to greater (human) resources than one relying on independently recruited staff.
IOs generally lack the “concentrated means of violence” (Levi 1988) to enforce a true taxation system but can deny membership benefits and shame states. The distinction between quasi- and true tax systems is a question of enforcement for most rationalists but to others may be an issue of IO legitimacy.
I am grateful to an external reviewer for making this point.
The NPT enshrines a grand bargain in which non-nuclear weapon states promise not to acquire, or help others to acquire, nuclear weapons, and the nuclear weapons states promise to disarm and ensure access to peaceful nuclear technologies for all NPT states. Nuclear weapon-free zones (NWFZs) are regional treaties banning nuclear weapons in their territories. They generally follow the same pattern of delegating to the IAEA the authority to implement safeguards, similar to the language used in the NPT (Quester 1973; McKnight 1971; Jensen 1974; Wittner 1997; Pilat 2005; US Senate 1978).
IAEA official documents are announced through “Information Circulars,” hence the “INFCIRC/” designation.
The Secretariat may have also had greater freedom in writing INFCIRC/540 than INFCIRC/153 because of the end of the Cold War (Official 2005b).
Many safeguards imposed as a condition of nuclear supply are trilateral agreements, allowing safeguards to revert to the supplier state if the IAEA is somehow prevented from implementing safeguards. However, these safeguards tend to be item specific.
Accession to INFCIRC/540 is not currently considered by the IAEA to be necessary for compliance with NPT commitments, though the IAEA is considering seeking approval to make it mandatory (Official 2005a).
This change is welcomed by “safe” states that bear a large safeguards burden, such as Japan and Germany, but rejected by states whose compliance is more suspect.
The IAEA’s enforcement powers include the authority to terminate nuclear assistance between members, which is possibly quasi-public enforcement (a “4”) and its capacity to impose costs by terminating Technical Cooperation assistance could be considered public enforcement (a “5”). The difference would be across time for the IAEA and therefore would cause statistical differences only in comparisons to other institutions.
The voluntary contributions reported in the budget, which does not include many “in-kind” contributions of goods and services, exceeded 20% of the amount assessed on the member states in 11 years and was less than 10% in only 2 years.
The data indicate a jump in staffing in the late 1980s, however the spike is an artifact of changes in IAEA reporting; beginning in the late 1970s the IAEA reported conflicting numbers in its Annual Report and its annual Budget Report.
To exemplify, the United States appoints its own with 16.77% of votes in both the Executive Board and the Board of Governors, whereas Spain, Mexico and other Central American countries together elect an Executive Director who votes on the Executive Board with their collective voting power of 4.45% (IMF 2009b).
The original text does not refer to an Executive Board, only the Executive Directors, though the description of their behavior is similar.
Though in decline, US voting power is sufficient to enable it to block proposals which require an 85% majority to pass: amendments, quota adjustments, and membership admissions or expulsions.
For a review of current IMF monitoring authorities, see Lavigne et al. (2009).
Offering $17b to be spent over four years, compared to the IMF’s reserves of $7.6b, the US blocked IMF loans to any country that participated in the Marshall Plan (Driscoll 1988, 6).
Southard implies the Directors’ acceptance of a hands-off role was an act of self-restraint; as he notes, the Executive Board recognized no single Director could represent all their interests (Southard 1979, 6,10).
States appear to want transparency into their own programs as a check on IMF staff, to tie their own hands with domestic actors, and, increasingly, as a signal to third-party investors (Gould 2006b).
As a result, the formula used to translate quotas into voting power is highly politicized; it was most recently revised in 2008 to increase the voice of developing states.
Lagged dependent variable (LDV) tests are inappropriate with many autoregressive processes (Keele and Kelly 2005, 203). Maximum likelihood models, including ordered probit, are inappropriate because of the small number of observations. Further, this discards significant variation in the dependent variable, a goal of this project. Tests yielded similar results but an expectation of unreliable and biased errors from the constrained sample and fewer controls.
The missing Adjusted R2 score for models R1-R2 are not a typographical error.
Gold prices are a possible candidate, but is excluded because prices were fixed in terms of gold throughout a large portion of the period.
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Brown, R.L. Measuring Delegation. Rev Int Organ 5, 141–175 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-009-9076-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-009-9076-3