Abouharb, M;
Cingranelli, D;
Filippov, M;
(2019)
Too Many Cooks: Multiple International Principals Can Spoil the Quality of Governance.
Social Sciences
, 8
(5)
, Article 139. 10.3390/socsci8050139.
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Abstract
We contribute to the research stream emphasizing the competition between international organizations and citizens for influence over the domestic policy choices of national politicians. Drawing upon previous theoretical and empirical work on the common agency problem, we contend that the joint influence of a country’s memberships in multiple international governmental organizations (IGOs) generates consistent, unintended, disruptive effects, which reduces domestic accountability and can worsen the quality of domestic government. Even if we assume that joining any particular IGO is beneficial for member states, the competing demands of multiple IGO memberships could undermine the quality of their governments. Our comparative, cross-national empirical findings support this theoretical expectation. Countries participating in a larger number of IGOs tend to have poorer scores on five widely used indicators of the quality of domestic government. Future research should identify the types of policies and countries where the negative externalities of international cooperation on domestic accountability are greatest.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Too Many Cooks: Multiple International Principals Can Spoil the Quality of Governance |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.3390/socsci8050139 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci8050139 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | multiple principals; international governmental organizations; domestic accountability; agency loss; quality of domestic government |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Political Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10072115 |
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