Mareike Kleine

Informal Governance in the European Union: How Governments Make International Organizations Work

The European Union is the world’s most advanced international organization, presiding over a level of legal and economic integration unmatched in global politics. To explain this achievement, many observers point to its formal rules that entail strong obligations and delegate substantial power to supranational actors such as the European Commission. This legalistic view, Mareike Kleine contends, is misleading. More often than not, governments and bureaucrats informally depart from the formal rules and thereby contradict their very purpose. Behind the EU’s front of formal rules lies a thick network of informal governance practices. If not the EU’s rules, what accounts for the high level of economic integration among its members? How does the EU really work? In answering these questions, Kleine proposes a new way of thinking about international organizations. Informal governance affords governments the flexibility to resolve conflicts that adherence to EU rules may generate at the domestic level. By dispersing the costs that integration may impose on individual groups, it allows governments to keep domestic interests aligned in favor of European integration. The combination of formal rules and informal governance therefore sustains a level of cooperation that neither regime alone permits, and it reduces the EU’s democratic deficit by including those interests into deliberations that are most immediately affected by its decisions. In illustrating informal norms and testing how they work, Kleine provides the first systematic analysis, based on new material from national and European archives and other primary data, of the parallel development of the formal rules and informal norms that have governed the EU from the 1958 Treaty of Rome until today.

Trading Control: National Chiefdoms within International Organizations

According to Principal-Agent theory, states (the principal) delegate the implementation of a legalized agreement to an international organization (the agent). The conventional wisdom about states’ capacity to control international organizations is that differences among the member states impede control and consequently enhance the agent’s autonomy, whereas agreement allows for effective control and limited autonomy. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, this article argues that conflicts among states need not impede effective control. On the contrary: it harbors gains from the exchange of informal control over an organization’s divisions. As a result, international organizations exhibit informal spheres of influence, or national chiefdoms. The article demonstrated the theory’s plausibility using the example of the EU. It has implications for the literature on delegation and informal governance.

Negotiating under Political Uncertainty: National Elections and the Dynamics of International Co-operation

This article explores if (and how) national elections affect the chances of concluding an international agreement. Drawing on a literature about the informational efficiency of elections, it examines how political uncertainty in the run-up to an election impacts the dynamics of international negotiations. Using the case of decision making in the European Union (EU), it finds that (1) pending national elections significantly reduce the chances of reaching an agreement at the international level (2) this effect is strongest during close elections with uncertain outcomes and (3) the effect is particularly pronounced in the case of elections in larger member states. The findings highlight the fruitfulness of further research on the dynamics between national and international politics. The article has positive and normative implications for the literature on two-level games, international negotiations and legislative bargaining in the EU.

National elections in a globalizing world

National elections are an essential component of a democratic society. But, cautions Mareike Kleine, elections can divert attention away from ongoing international negotiations, so their timing should be carefully considered.

Informal governance and legitimacy in EU politics

ABSTRACT Informal governance often holds an aura of the covert and exclusive – aspects that are difficult to square with the ideal of a democratic process. Unfortunately, existing analyses mostly focus on the effect of informal governance on transparency, ignoring other channels through which a political order may generate legitimacy. However, existing analyses quite often conflate different types of informal governance or consider predominantly its effect on transparency and accountability. This article argued that the relationship between informal governance and legitimacy is much more complex and to some extent even counter-intuitive. To see this, I distinguish three channels of legitimation – input, throughput, and output – and discuss how various forms of informal governance affect it. The article has implications for scholarly debates on the legitimacy of global governance, studies of informal governance, and practical implications for the reform of international organizations.

Liberal Intergovernmentalism and Its Critics: LI and Its Critics

This introduction sets the stage for a special issue devoted to evaluating the contribution and continued relevance of Liberal Intergovernmentalism (LI) – a theory first formulated 25 years ago in this journal – in todays politicized and crisis‐ridden European Union (EU). We review the debates prompted by LIs three core claims about national preference formation, intergovernmental bargaining and institutional choice, as well as by the theorys three policy‐relevant corollaries relating to the EUs democratic deficit, its constitutional settlement and its role in the world. Liberal intergovernmentalism, we argue, remains highly relevant in todays EU, offering important insights and serving to structure much of the academic debate about the prospects of the Union in a time of crisis. Nevertheless, a revitalized LI faces the dual challenges of theorizing both the causes and consequences of mass politicization of EU politics, as well as the prospect of endogenous change in the direction of greater integration or disintegration.

The Industrial Organization of International Bureaucracies: National Chiefdoms within International Organizations

This paper presents a transaction cost-based theory of informal spheres of national influence. It is based on the assumption that sometimes diversity of interests among states, instead of impeding control, creates gains from exchange in terms of controlling different aspects of the international organization’s output. Drawing on distributive models of Congress, which show that rather than trading votes in an explicit market, legislators exchange property rights over their most preferred policy jurisdictions, it is argued that states sustain complex political exchanges by granting one another agenda control over their most preferred subdivisions within the international organization. As a result, these organizations exhibit informal spheres of national influence. The theory has two implications that the paper evaluates. First, member states grant one another agenda control over their most preferred subdivisions. Therefore, we would expect national chiefdoms to be controlled by preference outliers with strong interests in the subdivision’s policy. Second, since the existence of multiple dimensions and issues is a precondition for states to reap gains from political exchange, single-dimensional international organization provide fewer opportunities for these deals. Therefore, single-dimensional international organizations should be less likely to develop national chiefdoms than organizations that comprise multiple policy areas. The findings have important implications for the literature on international organization and Principal-Agent models in particular.