To Yield or Shield? Comparing International Public Administrations’ Responses to Member States’ Policy Contestation

Abstract

When member states contest policymaking in international organizations, some international public administrations (IPAs) react in a conciliatory way while others are adversarial. This article argues that IPAs’ dependence on contesting states, their policymaking authority, and affectedness from contestation shape communicative responses. A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 32 cases of contestation by the Trump administration indicates that IPAs yield when they are constrained by dependence on the United States or have no incentive to defend themselves. IPAs fend off contestation when they are unconstrained and incentivized by attacks on an international organizations’s polity, the bureaucracy, or policies in whose making they were substantially involved.

Keywords:

• legitimacy
• international organizations
• international public administrations
• policy contestation
• qualitative comparative analysis
• public communication

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editors of this Special Issue for their guidance. The article was previously presented at the workshop “Contested Liberal World Order – Nationalist Challenges for Multilateralism” in June 2019 at LMU Munich, the ECPR General Conference 2019 in Wrocław, the workshop “Decline and Death of International Organizations” in January 2020 at Brussels, as well as the research colloquium of the Chair of Empirical Theory of Politics at LMU Munich. We owe special gratitude to Christian Adam, Louisa Bayerlein, Arjen Boin, Hylke Dijkstra, Steffen Eckhard, Jörn Ege, Xavier Fernández-i-Marín, Orfeo Fioretos, Stephanie C. Hofmann, Nora Stappert, Tobias Lenz, Gary Marks, Henning Schmidtke, Thomas Sommerer, Theresa Squatrito, Lora Viola, Inken von Borzyskowski, and Bernhard Zangl for their excellent comments and suggestions.

Supplemental data

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13876988.2020.1822144.

Notes

1. We use the term IPA to differentiate IO administrations from member states in IO governing bodies. IPAs are “hierarchically organized group[s] of international civil servants with a given mandate, resources, identifiable boundaries, and a set of formal rules of procedures” (Biermann and Siebenhüner 2009, p. 37).

2. To be sure, non-contesting states might be dissatisfied about an IPA’s conciliatory response to the contesting member state(s), triggering contestation on their part. However, this threat is rather diffuse and unlikely to immediately escalate into material sanctions. By contrast, the threat posed by contesting states is concrete as they are already one step “ahead” in the escalation process.

3. While Israel supported US contestation in a few cases, including Israel would not have changed the values of the respective cases regarding the respective IOs’ dependence on the contesting states.

4. When the same IO was contested several times, but the object of contestation changed, we treated them as separate cases.

5. See Supplementary Material, Section 2, for detailed coding rules, examples, and raw data.

6. In cases where the Trump administration’s contestation comprised withdrawing membership (e.g. UNESCO) or the complete funding (e.g. UNFPA), we also coded the IPAs as independent as they cannot expect to obtain the same funding level as under the Obama administration.

7. In the Supplementary Material, we checked whether the inconsistencies stem from an omitted condition by calculating two further model specifications: we probed whether experience with earlier contestation by the same government or earlier sanctions by the contesting state are also associated with IPAs’ responses. However, the results do not substantially differ from our original solution and the inconsistencies are not resolved (Section 4). We also reexamined the operationalization of the outcome and conditions by testing alternative cut-off points (Section 3.2), yet the obtained solutions were all subsets of our original solution. Finally, we ran a model that excluded all 17 contradictory cases (Section 3.3). Its results led to a sharp decrease of the solution’s coverage. When we allowed the algorithm to make assumptions for the lack of configurations, the results equaled our original solution. In the end, we opted to not sacrifice coverage and parsimony for consistency.

8. The dependence condition comes closest. For the outcome conciliatory response, we obtain a consistency score of 0.95. Yet, due to the deviant cases IAEA1, 2, 3 and UNICEF, its coverage of 0.82 is below the 0.9 threshold.

9. Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO, cited by McCaskill and Lima (2017).

10. Joel Charny, executive director of Norwegian Refugee Council USA, cited by Welsh (2018).

11. Caryl Stern, President of UNICEF USA, cited by Hart (2018).

12. Erik Solheim, Executive Director of UNEP, cited by Agence Francaise-Presse (2017).

13. Roberto Azevedo, Director-General of WTO, cited by Swanson (2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Heinkelmann-Wild

Tim Heinkelmann-Wild is a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. In his research, he examines the causes and consequences of the contestation of multilateral institutions. His research was published, inter alia, in the European Political Science Review, Governance, and the Journal of European Public Policy.

Vytautas Jankauskas

Vytautas Jankauskas is a research fellow at the University of Konstanz and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. In his research, he explores international organizations, focusing on the relationship between member states and international bureaucracies, the role of trust, control, and power. The results of his research were published in Governance, Policy Sciences, Evaluation, among others.