Tim Büthe

Taking Temporality Seriously: Modeling History and the Use of Narratives as Evidence

Social scientists interested in explaining historical processes can, indeed should, refuse the choice between modeling causal relationships and studying history. Identifying temporality as the defining characteristic of processes that can be meaningfully distinguished as “history,” I show that modeling such phenomena engenders particular difficulties but is both possible and fruitful. Narratives, as a way of presenting empirical information, have distinctive strengths that make them especially suited for historical scholarship, and structuring the narratives based on the model allows us to treat them as data on which to test the model. At the same time, this use of narratives raises methodological problems not identified in recent debates. I specify these problems, analyze their implications, and suggest ways of solving or minimizing them. There is no inherent incompatibility between—but much potential gain from—modeling history and using historical narratives as data.

Global Private Politics: A Research Agenda

In this concluding essay to the special issue on Private Regulation in the Global Economy, I review the main findings, focused on the answers that the papers in this issue jointly suggest to the three sets of core questions noted in the introductory essay: (1) How do private bodies attain regulatory authority? Why do private regulators provide governance and why do the targets of these rules comply? (2) Who governs? Who are the key actors in private regulation and what are their motivations? (3) What is the effect of the rise of private regulation on public regulatory authority and capacity? I then identify and discuss several key issues to develop a research agenda for what I call “global private politics.”

Engineering Uncontestedness? The Origins and Institutional Development of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)

Private regulation often entails competition among multiple rule-makers, but private rules and regulators do not always compete. For substantial parts of the global economy, a single private body (per issue) is recognized as the focal point for global rule-making. The selection of the institutional setting here effectively takes place prior to drawing up the specific rules, with important consequences for the politics of regulating global markets. In this paper, I develop a theoretical explanation for how a private transnational organization may attain such preeminencehow it can become the focal point for rule-makingin its area of expertise. I emphasize the transnational bodys capacity to pursue its organizational self-interest, as well as timing and sequence. I then examine empirically a particularly important body of this kind, which today is essentially uncontested as the focal point for private regulation in its area, even though its standards often have substantial distributive implications: the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). I analyze the persistence and changes in the IECs formal rules or procedures and informal norms, as well as the broadening scope of its regulatory authority and membership over more than a century.

Distributional Consequences of Transnational Private Regulation: Institutional Complementarity as a Structural Source of Power in Global Product and Financial Markets

Transnational regulations, often established by private bodies, play a large and important role in the international political economy. This paper makes two contributions to the literature on transnational regulation. First, governments and international organization often legitimate the delegation of regulatory authority to transnational private bodies with efficiency gains. It is rare, however, that the alleged gains are empirically examined, which requires a comparative analysis vis-à-vis other regulatory regimes. I contrast rule-making for manufactured goods and financial reporting, where a single transnational private body is the clear focal point for rule-making at the international level, with purely domestic regulatory regimes and the prior attempts to establish international product and financial standards through negotiations between governments or public regulators. I show that the shift to transnational (private) regulation indeed brought real, substantial gains in the effectiveness and efficiency of rule-making. Second, I scrutinize the distributional consequences of transnational private regulation, which I submit are closely related to the efficiency gains. Here, the existing literature focuses on the distribution of the financial costs and benefits of specific rules among those who are the targets of such rules, given a particular regulatory regime. Institutional complementarity theory provides a powerful analytical framework for examining such distributional effects. In this paper, I push the framework further to examine the distributional consequences of the shift to transnational private regulation. I argue that this shift has persistent structural consequences for the relative power of a broad range of stakeholders (both within and across countries) and thus for their regulatory capabilities.

Private Transnational Governance of Economic Development: International Development Aid

This paper examines the role of private actors in international development aid, focusing on four new actors or actors who have in recent years taken on new roles: (1) transnational aid NGOs as a channel of delivery for public (governmental) development aid; (2) transnational aid NGOs as development agenda-setters; (3) foundations and corporations as sources of development aid; (4) transnational aid NGOs as private providers of privately funded aid. For each of them, we discuss the sources of their power and influence and examine how ideas about development and aid have shaped the rise of these new players, identifying throughout promising and important areas for future research. In the final section, we consider peer-to-peer development aid and other innovative attempts to solve pervasive accountability problems in development aid. The paper was written as a chapter for the forthcoming Handbook on Global Economic Governance (Routledge), for which is has been accepted for publication in 2013. The posted version is the pre-copyedit manuscript.

Private Global Regulation: The Politics of Setting Standards for International Product and Financial Markets

Divergent national standards often inhibit trade in goods and services. Consequently, the setting of international standards is rapidly becoming an issue of considerable economic and political salience. But who sets international standards? Who wins, who loses? Building on previous studies we have done, we are presenting in this paper a first general theory of international regulatory processes that take place in non-governmental institutional settings. Largely overlooked in IPE, these processes have moved to center-stage of global regulation as states have delegated ever-greater regulatory authority to transnational non-governmental bodies. Our theory provides a comprehensive account of how domestic or regional institutional features of private-sector groups systematically shape the politics of global regulation. We test a series of propositions on data collected by us through international business surveys over the last six years, covering both product and financial markets. We conclude by highlighting the challenges to global due process and democratic governance identified by our research.

Delegation and Agency in International Organizations

Delegation and Agency in International Organizations. Edited by Darren G. Hawkins, David A. Lake, Daniel L. Nielson, and Michael J. Tierney. 424p. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

The Economic Effects of Electoral Uncertainty: An Analysis of a Direct Measure of Uncertainty in Business' Economic Expectations During Pre- and Post-Election Periods in Germany, 1975-2000

80.00 cloth,

The Politics of Foreign Direct Investment into Developing Countries: Increasing FDI through International Trade Agreements?

34.99 paper. This volume examines and exemplifies the usefulness of principal-agent (P-A) theory for the study of international relations through a set of well-integrated analyses of delegation to international (governmental) organizations (IOs). The editors begin with some useful, explicit definitions of key terms. They define delegation as a revocable “grant of authority” from one or more “principal(s)” to an “agent,” which enables “the latter to act on behalf of the former” in a specified domain and/or for a limited period of time. The agents discretion in how to pursue the principals objectives is a direct inverse function of the precision of the rules laid down by the principal. Agent autonomy, by contrast, is defined as the possible range of actions the agent can take contrary to the principals interests, net whatever mechanism the principal may have put in place to control the agent. To the extent that an agent actually pursues his own interests contrary to the principals, we see agency slack.

The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy

This paper - posted here as written for and presented at presentation at the 13th International Conference of Europeanists of the Council for European Studies at Palmer House, Chicago, 14-16 March 2002 - develops and tests a set of hypotheses about the effect of political uncertainty during pre- and post-election periods on the certitude with which respondents to business surveys hold their expectations about the business situation in a given country in the near future. Based on the technique for quantification of qualitative business survey responses developed by Grätz, Knöbl, Carlson, and Parkin, I propose a way of measuring expectations uncertainty directly. Applying this method to survey data about the expected business situation from the ifo Konjunkturtest for Germany, I operationalize and test the argument for the German federal elections from 1976 to 1998. The hypotheses are broadly confirmed for 1976, 1980, 1983, and 1994; and partly confirmed for 1987, 1990, and 1998. Where the data seem to disconfirm the hypotheses, various aspects of the particular political context can explain this divergence, though such factors are outside the simple model presented here. The research presented in this paper is part of a larger project, my PhD dissertation, which investigates the influence of political factors on business confidence in advanced capitalist democracies. It seeks to systematize, theorize, and empirically test effects that are frequently assumed or treated anecdotally in the literature on international and comparative political economy.