Unilateral Influence on International Bureaucrats

Abstract

The conventional wisdom emphasizes agency slack or bias as the central problem of international delegation. I show that the possibility of a unilateral influence contest is equally problematic. States can exert unilateral influence on autonomous international bureaucrats, either through rewards or through punishments, to pursue their particular interests. A costly contest results, so some states could refuse to delegate because they expect others to be too influential. The analysis has four counterintuitive empirical implications. First, international agreements often favor institutionally weak states that are disadvantaged in the unilateral influence contest. Second, states could limit the autonomy of an international organization even if this prompts bad policies. Third, a state can sometimes profitably exchange distributional concessions for autonomy. Finally, constraints on unilateral influence are possible only if a disadvantaged state can credibly commit to compensating an advantaged state for it. A central broader contribution of the analysis is to show how power politics influences the rational design of international institutions.

Who Runs the International System? Power and the Staffing of the United Nations Secretariat

“…Johns 2007, Urpelainen 2012, Johnson 2013) that has little direct crossover with this paper, but reinforces the notion that international bureaucrats retain allegiance to their home countries.…”

Shadow bureaucracies and the unilateral control of international secretariats: Insights from UN peacekeeping

“…The US was certainly informally involved at early stages of the planning, had sufficient privileged access as well as nationals in key planning positions, yet it preferred to act through the UNSC rather than the Secretariat. Given that it is typically assumed that strong states hold more influence over secretariats than weak states (Stone 2011;Urpelainen 2012), this presents a new puzzle. Perhaps the US anticipated few difficulties in the UNSC or perhaps convincing UN officials was deemed too costly or tiresome.…”

“…In addition to such collective oversight, individual member states may invest in unilateral control mechanisms. The aim of unilateral control is to either incentivize the secretariat to pursue policies closer to the interests of the relevant member state (Urpelainen 2012;Panke 2012;Stone 2011) or to reduce the informational advantage of the secretariat vis-à-vis the member state in question. Unilateral control is required when collective oversight proofs insufficient.…”

“…The extent to which individual member states invest in shadow bureaucracies depends on their resources and agency costs. Shadow bureaucracies allow states unilateral control over secretariats (Urpelainen 2012). States that invest insufficiently in autonomous assessment may lose out.…”

“…The member states acting as a collective principal(Nielson and Tierney 2003) may, in exceptional cases, have the same preferences as the secretariat, yet this does not prevent individual member states from trying to influence the secretariat(Urpelainen 2012).4 In addition, secretariats have institutional preferences such as an appetite for larger budgets, more competences and staff (e.g.,Vaubel 1986;Pollack 2003;Vaubel et al 2007;Niskanen 1971).…”