International Authority: From Concept to Measure

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liesbet Hooghe ◽  
Gary Mark ◽  
Tobias Lenz ◽  
Jeanine Bezuijen ◽  
Besir Ceka ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Dispute Settlement ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
International Organization ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
International Authority ◽  
Formal Authority ◽  
State Actors

Chapter One discusses the theoretical-conceptual underpinnings of the Measure of International Authority (MIA). In what respects, and to what extent, do international organizations exert legal rational authority? What powers do non-state actors have in international decision making and dispute settlement? To what extent, when, and how do states sacrifice the national veto in collective decision making? The chapter is structured in a sequence of five steps from the abstract to the particular: conceptualize authority; specify the concept as formal authority of international organizations; unfold in the dimensions of delegation and pooling; operationalize international organization (IO) composition and decision making in indicators that describe institutional alternatives that can be reliably assessed; explicate principles for scoring and adjudicating cases.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Liesbet Hooghe ◽  
Tobias Lenz ◽  
Gary Marks
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
International Organization ◽  
International Governance ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
The Core ◽  
Set Up

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.

scholarly journals Analogy-based collective decision-making and incremental change in international organizations

2021 ◽  
pp. 135406612098788
Author(s):  
Thomas Dörfler ◽  
Thomas Gehring
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Incremental Change ◽  
Collective Decisions ◽  
Informal Rules

We examine how analogy-based collective decision-making of member states contributes to the endogenous emergence of informal rules and the incremental change of international organizations (IOs). Decision-making by analogy is an important characteristic of day-to-day decision-making in IOs. Relating current decisions to previous ones through analogies drives incremental change and simultaneously reinforces organizational resilience. Whereas the foreign policy analysis literature shows that analogies can be used as cognitive shortcuts in fuzzy and complex foreign policy situations, we focus on their use to overcome social ambiguity (indeterminacy) of coordination situations in IOs. Drawing on psychological conceptions, we develop two micro-level mechanisms that elucidate the effects of analogy-based collective decision-making in member-driven IOs. Analogy-based collective decisions emphasizing similarity between a current situation and previous ones follow an established problem schema and produce expansive and increasingly well-established informal rules. Collective decisions that are analogy-based but emphasize a crucial difference follow different problem schemas and trigger the emergence of additional informal rules that apply to new classes of cases. The result is an increasingly fine-grained web of distinct organizational solutions for a growing number of problems. Accordingly, an IO can increasingly facilitate collective decision-making and gains resilience. Empirically, we probe these propositions with a documentary analysis of decision-making in the Yugoslavia sanctions committee, established by the United Nations Security Council to deal with a stream of requests for exempting certain goods or services from the comprehensive economic embargo imposed on Yugoslavia in response to the War in the Balkans.

Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "

Multi-Regional

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liesbet Hooghe ◽  
Gary Mark ◽  
Tobias Lenz ◽  
Jeanine Bezuijen ◽  
Besir Ceka ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
International Organizations ◽  
Dispute Settlement ◽  
Coding Scheme ◽  
International Authority ◽  
Consultative Body

This chapter presents profiles on the delegation and pooling of authority in eleven multi-regional or global international organizations (IOs). Each profile explains how the coding scheme is applied to the IO by charting a path from the primary and secondary evidence to scoring judgments. They tell the reader how the assembly, executive, secretariat, consultative body, and dispute settlement of each IO are composed, what decisions each body makes, and how they make decisions. The profiles chart these developments annually since 1950. The authors indicate four kinds of uncertainty in superscript: α‎ for thin information; β‎ for a case that falls between the intervals on a dimension; γ‎ for disagreement among sources; δ‎ for inconsistency between written rules in the IO. Each profile is followed by tables summarizing the authors’ observations. Data and codebooks for the Measure of International Authority (MIA) are available on the authors’ websites.

Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Collective Judgment ◽  
Hidden Knowledge

The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of individual judgment, placing it instead into the realm of collective judgment. The Athenian experience therefore suggests that participatory democracy, and a civic culture that fosters political equality rather than reliance on individual expertise, provides a key bulwark against corruption.

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