The Resistible Rise of International Authority

Chapter 6 explains change in pooling and delegating authority to an IO. An IO’s authority is responsive to two pressures, one functional and one social. Functional pressures stem from the need to make decision making tractable under an expanding policy portfolio. This induces an IO’s member states to pool authority in majoritarian decision making and to delegate agenda setting to independent agents who can develop proposals and mediate disputes. Socio-political pressures arise from nationalist resistance to the loss of national self-rule. Politicization can constrain IO authority even in the presence of intense functional pressures. A two-stage model confirms the hypothesis that functional pressures are socially conditioned.

Philosophical Foundations of a Postfunctionalist Theory of International Organization

Chapter 2 lays out the hard core of a postfunctionalist theory of international organization. The point of departure is to conceive governance as a social contract among rational actors to escape anarchy. It refines social contract theory by assuming that a contract for governance can concentrate authority or disperse it across territorial scales by bundling problems or decomposing them among separate jurisdictions. Postfunctionalism proposes that the willingness to conclude a highly incomplete contract depends on whether participants think of themselves as a community. The remainder of the book specifies and tests the theory’s observational implications.

Introduction

Chapter 1 sets out the core puzzle of international governance, introduces postfunctionalist theory, and situates it in relation to realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism. Postfunctionalism theorizes how conceptions of community constrain the functional provision of public goods across territorial scale. It hypothesizes that international organization is social as well as functional and provides a precise and falsifiable explanation of the institutional set-up of an IO, including its membership, contractual basis, policy portfolio, and the extent to which an IO pools authority in collective decision making and delegates authority to independent actors.

Why States Pool Authority

Why do states sacrifice the national veto in international organizations? A large membership IO can exploit economies of scale and allow states to cooperate over problems that would otherwise confront them individually. However, cooperation among a large number of states brings the danger of decisional blockage. The most plausible explanation for why member states pool authority in international organizations appears to be the simplest: they do so in response to the number of potential veto players in the organization. This argument is assessed in a cross-sectional analysis for seventy-six international organizations using a measure of pooling that distinguishes the mode, bindingness, and substantive area of decision making.

The Basic Set-Up

Chapter 4 explains the basic set-up of an IO—its membership, contract, and policy portfolio. It conceives the basic set-up as resulting from the tension between the functional benefits of providing public goods at an international scale and the preference of exclusive communities for self-rule. The theory expects international organization to be bimodal. General purpose IOs build on transnational community to contract cooperation as an open-ended venture among peoples. Task-specific IOs contract cooperation narrowly so that states, no matter how diverse, can come together to problem-solve in a targeted way. General purpose and task-specific IOs relate to their constituencies differently, and this shapes the scale of their membership, their openness to membership growth, and the breadth and dynamism of their policy portfolios.

Five Theses on International Governance

Chapter 8 summarizes the argument of the book in five theses: IO governance has both a formal and an informal basis; its foundation is contractual; and sociality and politicization alongside functionality explain how IOs are structured and how they make decisions. The possibilities for governance in the international domain appear to be circumscribed by how the populations encompassed in an IO perceive themselves in relation to each other—the extent to which they see themselves as sharing some transnational community. How do they conceive the trade-off between national self-rule and international shared rule? A postfunctionalist theory of international organization claims that governance is both an expression of community and an institutional adaptation to the functional provision of public goods.

Why Do Some IOs Expand their Policy Portfolio?

Chapter 5 explains change in an IO’s policy portfolio. The model is in two steps. In a first step, the extent to which an IO is grounded on an incomplete contract determines its responsiveness to exogenous shocks. Second and causally prior to this, contractual incompleteness is feasible only when the participants share norms that can allay fears of exploitation. Around three-quarters of the IOs in our sample exhibit change in their policy portfolios over the past sixty years, yet their trajectories vary widely. A model that specifies an IO’s contractual basis and its prior normative conditions explains more than half of the variance in the policy portfolio over time.

Measuring International Authority

Chapter 3 explains why it makes sense to conceptualize international authority as delegation and pooling, and how these abstract qualities can be measured. A processual model of IO decision making disaggregates the rules for agenda setting, final decision making, bindingness of decisions, ratification, and dispute settlement across each of six decision areas—policymaking, constitutional reform, the budget, financial compliance, membership accession, and the suspension of members—for individual IO bodies. The chapter concludes by summarizing variation in pooling and delegation for seventy-six major IOs cross-sectionally and over time (1950–2010).