Darren Hawkins

Delegation and Agency in International Organizations

Part I. Introduction: 1. Delegation under anarchy: states, international organizations, and principal-agent theory Darren G. Hawkins, David A. Lake, Daniel L. Nielson and Michael J. Tierney Part II. Variation in Principal Preferences, Structure, Decision Rules, and Private Benefits: 2. A problem of principals: common agency and social lending at the multilateral development banks Mona Lyne, Daniel L. Nielson and Michael J. Tierney 3. US domestic politics and international monetary fund policy J. Lawrence Broz and Michael Brewster Hawes 4. Why multilateralism? Foreign aid and domestic principal-agent problems Helen V. Milner 5. Distribution, information, and delegation to international organizations: the case of IMF conditionality Lisa L. Martin 6. Delegation and discretion in the European Union Mark A. Pollack Part III. Variation in Agent Preferences, Legitimacy, Tasks, and Permeability: 7. How agents matter Darren G. Hawkins and Wade Jacoby 8. Screening power: international organizations as informative agents Alexander Thompson 9. Dutiful agents, rogue actors, or both? Staffing, voting rules, and slack in the WHO and WTO Andrew P. Cortell and Susan Peterson 10. Delegating IMF conditionality: understanding variations in control and conformity Erica R. Gould 11. Delegation to international courts and the limits of recontracting political power Karen J. Alter Part IV. Directions for Future Research: 12. The logic of delegation to international organizations David A. Lake and Mathew McCubbins.

Delegation and Agency in International Organizations: Delegation under anarchy: states, international organizations, and principal-agent theory

In December 1999, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into a mob protesting the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. A central theme of this and similar anti-globalization protests is that the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and other global institutions are “runaway” international bureaucracies implementing a “Washington consensus” formulated by professional economists and other neo-liberals who have made their careers within these agencies (Stiglitz 2002; Rich 1994). Other critics charge that these international organizations (IOs) are imperialist tools of the powerful, exploiting poor and disadvantaged countries for the benefit of the West. Although they have not yet taken to the streets, American conservatives, at the other end of the spectrum, argue that these IOs fail to promote the interests of the United States (Meltzer Commission Report 1999; Krauthammer 2001). Meanwhile, Europeans complain about the “democratic deficit” within the European Union (see Pollack 2003a: 407–14). As the EU expands its competencies and grows to twenty-five members, critics charge that the simultaneous deepening and broadening of the union is driven by unaccountable bureaucrats in the European Commission and the highly insulated judges of the European Court of Justice. Divorced from electoral pressures, these increasingly powerful EU institutions have allegedly escaped popular control. French and Dutch voters retaliated against the Brussels-led integration project by rejecting the proposed EU Constitution in June 2005.

Explaining Commitment: States and the Convention against Torture

Why do states commit to international human rights treaties that may limit state sovereignty? Existing arguments focus on either the fear of domestic democratic instability or on international norms. We focus instead on the variation in three kinds of costs that states must pay to commit: policy change, unintended consequences, and limited flexibility. We use a discrete time-duration model to test all of these explanations on state commitment to the international Convention Against Torture, one of the most important international human rights treaties. We find strong evidence for the importance of norms and all three types of costs, but no evidence supporting state desires to lock in the benefits of democracy in the face of domestic democratic instability.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Rome: Explaining International Criminal Court Negotiations

The first proposal for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1994 envisioned a weak institution. Over the subsequent four years, states surprisingly strengthened the draft to create a robust ICC with novel enforcement authority. What happened and why? We argue that during negotiations governments adopted the positions of the international partners on whom they depend for a diverse set of goods that includes trade, security, and foreign policy success in international organizations. We label this set of partners a “dependence network.” In our approach, leaders watch closely how other governments behave within their dependence network and alter their own actions accordingly. We test this theory against a variety of other explanations on a new database that codes state negotiating positions relative to four key institutional features of the ICC. We find that trade networks substantially influence state negotiating positions on the ICC even taking into account an array of other factors.

Protecting Democracy in Europe and the Americas

Especially since the end of the Cold War, the Council of Europe (CE) and the Organization of American States (OAS) have acted to protect democracy in their member states from erosion or reversals, with CE policies more robust than those in the Americas. What explains this variation? I develop an argument focusing on institutional permeability, or the extent to which those organizations are accessible to nonstate actors. Permeability consists of three dimensions: range of third parties allowed access, level of decision making at which access is granted, and transparency of IO information to those third parties. Higher levels of permeability are likely to produce higher levels of constraint on state behavior through increasing levels of precision and obligation in international rules and practices. Alternative explanations, summarized as regional democracy norms, domestic democratic lock-in interests, and the power of stable democracies cannot explain the variation in multilateral democracy protection. More broadly, this article suggests that “democratizing” IOs by allowing ever-greater access to nonstate actors is likely to result in stronger, more constraining international rules, even in areas where states most jealously guard their sovereignty, such as the nature of their domestic political institutions.

Questioning comprehensive sanctions: the birth of a norm

In this paper, the authors argue that a new international norm against comprehensive sanctions is emerging and gaining substantial support among states. A transnational network of individual activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) is driving the creation of this norm. To exercise its influence, the network mobilizes information about humanitarian suffering in states targeted by international sanctions and utilizes framing techniques to persuade others to endorse the new norm. Yet this explanation is incomplete. Humanitarian groups and norms trace their roots to the mid-1800s, and civilian suffering from sanctions undoubtedly goes back much farther, yet it was not until the mid-1990s that a norm against comprehensive sanctions began to emerge. In response, it is argued that the norm was triggered by the dramatic increase in sanctions imposed by the United Nations in the post-Cold War era. Both the UN’s accessibility and its prevailing humanitarian norms facilitated network influence. During the Cold War, states had imposed sanctions without utilizing the UN. With the dramatic increase in UN-sponsored sanctions in the 1990s, an organization whose normative foundations involve the alleviation of human suffering was itself direcdy responsible for imposing sanctions that deepened and prolonged human misery. This stark, well-publicized contrast offered a favorable normative and political environment in which the arguments of humanitarian groups would be taken seriously. It became impossible for states to argue that comprehensive sanctions and humanitarian well-being could be reconciled; as a result, one goal or the other had to be modified. Over time, steady network pressure to improve humanitarian conditions in sanctioned countries produced a reaction against comprehensive sanctions.

Dependence Networks and the Diffusion of Domestic Political Institutions

How and to what extent do states influence the level of democracy and autocracy in other states? We argue that states exist internationally in dependence networks with each other and that those networks provide pathways for influence on a state’s domestic institutions. For any given state, a dependence network is a set of partner states with whom it regularly engages in exchanges of valued goods, where those exchanges would be costly to break. We find that an index of three such networks–trade, security and shared international organization membership–significantly influences the domestic political institutions in a given state. These changes are substantively large in the long run, similar in size to regional and global levels of democracy. State capabilities figure heavily in our network measures, thus emphasizing the role of power in the diffusion of domestic political institutions. We also find that network-influenced change works both ways: states can become more autocratic or more democratic.

States and International Courts: The Politics of Prosecution in Sierra Leone

We examine the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) from the perspective of a principal-agent analysis. How much control did states exercise over the Courts prosecutor and what strategies did the prosecutor use to expand the Courts discretion? Although states generally delegate substantial discretion to international courts in order to maintain credibility, we find that states still exercised important influence over the SCSL by controlling resources vital to the Courts success. At the same time, the SCSL prosecutor implemented some strategies that enabled him to indict Charles Taylor against the wishes of the United States. The case suggests that states have figured out ways to achieve both credibility and influence, but that savvy international agents can have some success in circumventing the controls of state principals.

Transnational Activists as Motors for Change

Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Margaret E. Keck, Kathryn Sikkink (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). 240 pp., paper (ISBN: 0-8014-8456-1),

Do Citizens See Through Transparency? Evidence from Survey Experiments in Peru

15.95. Book reviewed: Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics , Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink