International parliamentary institutions (IPIs) have become an established feature of international politics. While scholars of international institutions have extensively studied why states delegate to international organizations (IOs) in general, they have said little about the creation of parliamentary bodies. Moreover, IPIs do not fit the functions commonly attributed to international delegation. By differentiating between general-purpose and taskspecific IOs, we hypothesize that general-purpose IOs establish and maintain parliamentary bodies that serve their legitimation needs. A nested quantitative and qualitative analysis based on an original dataset on the emergence of IPIs and case studies on the reform of the Economic Community of West African States and the development of the Pacific Islands Forum supports this explanation.

The proliferation of production networks and cross-border contracting is frequently cited as empowering globally active corporations to skirt, and shape, national regulations. While scholars often focus on the political gains from these new forms of business organization, we shift the conversation to the potential political costs of global firm reorganization. The spread of corporate subsidiaries and global supply-chain networks leave firms vulnerable to a host of jurisdictional claims, and by targeting a domestically rooted affiliate, states can bring the global practices of the multinational corporation in line with their interests. In other words, states can take advantage of the transnationalization of the firm to transnationalize their authority beyond traditional jurisdictional boundaries. We label this process “networked liabilities.” Specifically, the combination of a firm’s sunk costs and the country’s jurisdictional substitutability determines the ability of governments to exert demands on multinational corporations. A key contribution of the article is to better specify the relationship between mobility and authority and to illustrate that networked liabilities can further empower a variety of states beyond traditional economic powers like the US or the European Union. We further highlight when firms may curtail the authority of great powers. The growing reach of the regulatory state domestically, coupled with the transnationalization of the firm, creates an increasing number of tools for certain governments to engage in economic statecraft beyond their borders. Our findings, then, contribute to debates on business–government relations in a globalized world, the changing nature of political risk, and the deterritorialization of state authority.

No abstract

This chapter lays out the theoretical framework for the study of international parliamentary institutions (IPIs). First, it argues that IPIs display few of the functional benefits that are commonly associated with the delegation of competences to international institutions. Second, it claims that the assumption of normatively committed member states of international organizations (IOs) does not explain either the weakness of IPIs, their appearance in many IOs composed of non-democratic states, or their absence from IOs with a solid democratic membership. Third, we suggest that the creation and empowerment of IPIs is better understood as a legitimation strategy that governments employ strategically in response to challenges to the legitimacy of the organization. Maintaining or improving the legitimacy of an IO is important because it enhances the stability of cooperation and prevents the disruption of its operation, and international parliamentarization is specifically useful when democratic legitimacy is the standard by which relevant audiences judge an IO. Finally, we identify six structural conditions that generate variation in the normative cost–benefit calculus of governments. These relate to institutional characteristics of the IO itself (authority, purpose, and scope), as well as its domestic and international environment (democracy, governance failure, and diffusion).

This chapter analyses international parliamentarization in the Andean region. Andean integration has seen, first, the creation of the Andean Pact without an international parliamentary institution (IPI) in 1969, followed by the establishment of the Andean Parliament in 1979 and a slight IPI empowerment in conjunction with the foundation of the Andean Community in 1996. The Andean Parliament was created in the context of democratization in the region and a shift of the Andean Pact from a task-specific to a general-purpose organization. Whereas the conditions of parliamentarization continued to be favourable during the reform process leading to the Andean Community, none of them improved strongly enough to give a boost to parliamentary empowerment. Rather, institutional entrepreneurship was able to secure modest authority gains.

International parliamentary institutions (IPIs) are on the rise. Around the world, international organizations have increasingly established or affiliated parliamentary assemblies. At the same time, IPIs have generally remained powerless institutions with at best a consultative role in the decision-making process of international organizations. This book pursues the question why the member states of international organizations create IPIs but do not vest them with relevant institutional powers. It argues that neither the functional benefits of delegation nor the internalization of democratic norms provide convincing answers to this question. Rather, IPIs are an instrument of strategic legitimation. By establishing IPIs that mimic a highly esteemed domestic democratic institution, governments seek to ensure that audiences at home and in the wider international environment recognize their IOs as democratically legitimate. At the same time, they seek to avoid being effectively constrained by IPIs in international governance. In a statistical analysis covering the world’s most relevant international organizations and a series of case studies from diverse world regions, we find two major varieties of international parliamentarization. IOs with general purpose and high authority create and empower IPIs to legitimate their region-building projects domestically. Alternatively, IOs are induced to create parliamentary bodies by international diffusion.

This chapter presents the results of a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of the case studies on the establishment and empowerment of international parliamentary institutions by international organizations. The analysis looks for patterns in the necessary and sufficient conditions of international parliamentarization as well as for distinct and diverse configurations of conditions favouring, generating, and preventing international parliamentarization. The QCA suggests that there are two contexts of and pathways to IPI creation—one starting from general-purpose and high-authority international organizations (IOs), the other one driven by international diffusion of IO parliamentarization. At the same time, we find that the task-specificity of IOs is the major obstacle to IPI creation.

This chapter examines the parliamentarization of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The establishment of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly took place in the context of the post-Cold War democratization wave in Eastern Europe and the active diffusion efforts of the Council of Europe. Whereas the Western governments had a vested interest in ensuring the democratic transition of Eastern Europe, the young democracies sought international recognition as part of the European political community. Beyond this post-Cold War consensus, several options were under consideration. The chapter describes how the initial proposal of a joint parliamentary assembly of the OSCE with the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) was discarded in favour of a separate OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.