International bureaucracies and their influence on policy-making: a review of empirical evidence

ABSTRACT

Although we find considerable literature on international organizations and their bureaucratic interior, there has been little effort to systematically synthesize empirical research across the different academic disciplines examining how international bureaucracies affect policy-making at an international level. This contribution reviews existing research on the policy influence of international bureaucracies published during the past 50 years. Applying a keyword-based search strategy allows us to identify a core body of 83 books and articles. We find a general consensus in the literature that international bureaucrats do influence policy-making, though this influence varies with the political salience and scope of the decision at question. Yet there is still much disagreement about other context factors, including mechanisms and behavioural assumptions. The contribution advances the state of the art by extracting major disputes – mostly linked to diverging disciplinary perspectives – and existing gaps in the literature, and by suggesting areas for future research.

KEY WORDS:

• Global governance
• international civil servants
• international organizations
• literature review
• public policy
• public administration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Steffen Eckhard is a senior researcher at the University of Munich (LMU) and a non-resident fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin.

Jörn Ege is a research fellow at the German Research Institute for Public Administration Speyer.

Notes

1. To be sure, this does not mean that we deem publications in edited volumes less relevant. On the contrary, edited volumes have served as important fora for the advancement of research on internal features of IOs and their bureaucracies (e.g., Dingwerth et al. 2009; Kim et al. 2014; Reinalda and Verbeek 2004). As an exception to this general rule, we included the volumes edited by Biermann and Siebenhüner (2009) and Cox and Jacobsen (1973). In contrast to conventional volumes, these two books assemble the results of joint research efforts in a coherent manner and are thus particularly interesting for our purposes.

2. Importantly, not all of the studies are designed to identify a causal link between a dependent and one or more independent variables. Thus, the term ‘dependent variable’ (or explanandum) is, in fact, too narrow in this context. Nevertheless, since the expression ‘dependent variable’ is regularly used to denote the central analytical phenomenon of empirical research more broadly, we use this terminology in the course of the paper.

3. Our search included seven journal articles that aim to describe and explain the attitudes and role behaviour of individual civil servants. Since such a focus is not directly relevant for assessing the policy-making role of IPAs, the table refers to the reduced sample of 76 publications.

4. In order to indicate that a publication is part of the sample, the respective author and year of publication are printed in italics.

5. To be sure, the term ‘mechanism’ usually refers to causal processes through which influence operates. The reference to particular ‘characteristics' of administrations, in contrast, is more prominent in variable-oriented (comparative) approaches. Since our goals is to identify the different determinants of influence (no matter whether they are identified by means of process tracing or cross-case comparison), we do not further differentiate between diverging understandings of these two notions here.

6. Eight publications come from related disciplines such as history, anthropology or economics. The disciplinary origin of a publication is coded by considering the classification specified by the respective data base. In WoS, public administration research includes the research areas ‘Public Administration’ and ‘Law and Government’. International relations is a separate research area. For monographs, we coded the disciplinary origin according to the target discipline of the book series or, if this was not possible, according to the academic positions or denomination the authors hold at their home institution.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation under Grant FOR #1745.