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ABSTRACT
Why do political parties increasingly address international institutions? This paper analyses the politicisation of international governance, that is, a process in which institutions' policies and procedures become salient and controversial on the level of mass politics. It uses data on party platforms' content from 26 OECD countries to test a number of explanations for politicisation. Results suggest that scholarly debate tends to overestimate the role of globalisation for driving politicisation, while institutional variables are too often neglected. First, increased scope of international governance has made questions of international governance much more salient topics of party manifestos. Second, recent shifts of political authority to the international level can explain increased contestation of international governance to a remarkable extent. What is more, the contestation of international authority in the realm of electoral politics seems to be substantively shaped by exclusive nationalism, but not by democratic concerns.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank Martin Binder, Brian Burgoon, Ian Curtis, Andreas Dür, Monika Heupel, Markus Jachtenfuchs, Jacint Jordana, Mary Kelley-Bibra, Autumn Lockwood-Payton, Christian Rauh, Thomas Rixen, Duncan Snidal, Barçın Uluışık, Andrea Volkens, Tobias Weise, Michael Zürn, and the anonymous reviewers for comments to previous drafts of this article.
Notes
1 The term ‘international governance’, is meant to include global as well as regional forms of international institutions, but to exclude cooperation between non-governmental actors.
2 Note that the results presented show a high level of robustness if simpler techniques are applied, namely, OLS or negative binomial regression without exposure, both using salience measures based on percentage variables.
3 I thank Autumn Lockwood Payton for sharing this data with me.
4 Börzel identifies five issue areas for which the Treaty of Maastricht, 1992, brought about a subsequent shift from ‘intergovernmental cooperation’ to what she calls ‘joint decision making’, including an exclusive right of initiative of the European Commission, full judicial review by European Court of Justice and co-decision procedures or majority decision making. These areas are (1) external economic relations; (2) environmental/consumer protection; (3) economic freedoms; (4) territorial, economic and social cohesion; and (5) monetary policy (Börzel, Citation2005: 222–3). There is no other treaty reform (before or after Maastricht) for which Börzel identifies such a shift in more than one issue area.
5 These are the European Atomic Energy Commission (EURATOM), the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the European Economic Community/European Community (EEC), the European Food Code Council (EFCC), the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working (EFILWC), the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA), the European Investment Bank (EIB), the European Monetary Institute (EMI), the European Training Foundation (ETF), and the Western European Union (WEU).
6 Additional analyses also suggest that this effect can be largely attributed to a relationship between migration and the salience of European integration in the manifestos of European parties. One may speculate as to whether it may be due in any great measure to European circumstances, namely, a ‘Schengen effect’. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing this point up.
7 However, it also contradicts to some degree the research that has pointed to governments’ strategies to use international institutions as scapegoats in the public realm (Putnam, Citation1988; Wolf, 1999; Gerhards et al., Citation2013).
8 In the case of FDI, one might be tempted to think that societal expectations would vary regarding inflows and outflows of cross-border investments (see Haupt, Citation2010); however, the results do not differ significantly when we substitute the pooled measure FDI used in Models 2.1 to 2.5 with the individual measures of FDI inflows or outflows, respectively.
9 Alternative specifications of Democratic based on various combinations of CMP categories ‘Freedom and Human Rights’, ‘Democracy’, and ‘Constitutionalism’ also do not lead to more gratifying results from the perspective of a ‘democratic concerns’ perspective (see Zürn, Citation2004).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt
Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt is a visiting professor of international politics at Universität Leipzig and member of the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy at Freie Universität Berlin. His primary field of research is the political sociology of international politics, with a special interest in humanitarian politics, cosmopolitanism, and the public perception and contestation of international organisations. His most recent publications include ‘Cosmopolitan Politicization: How Perceptions of Interdependence Foster Citizens’ Expectations in International Institutions’, European Journal of International Relations (2012); ‘“But the UN Said So…” International Organisations as Discursive Authorities’, Global Society (2012); and ‘International Authority and Its Politicization’ (with M. Zürn and M. Binder), International Theory – A Journal of International Politics, Law and Philosophy (2012).