Singing Together or Apart? Comparing Policy Agenda Dynamics within International Organizations

Abstract

Are there substantial differences between the issues an IO's decision-making body agrees upon and the issues the organization's administrative body is dealing with in practice? Or are member states and the administration singing (to) the same tune? To tackle these questions, this article explores agenda congruence in three single-purpose organizations using methods of quantitative text analysis. The explorative empirical analysis shows that both change dynamics and agenda congruence exhibit substantial variation across the organizations. The findings suggest that agenda congruence decreases with the degree of authority delegated to the administration and the extent to which the administration tries to identify relevant policy issues from within the administration. Given that the results are well in line with what dominant theoretical accounts would predict, both concept and measurement are considered promising additions to the study of IOs and international public administrations.

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

“…IPAs are not always servants of their member states' power, but they are distinct authorities that carefully defend their legitimacy. Scholars analyzing IOs' behavior should thus differentiate between member states (and their governing bodies) and IPAs as actors in their own right (see also Bayerlein et al 2020;Goritz et al 2020).…”

Personnel Control and Local Officials’ Attention to Economic Development: Evidence from China

“…2 Since the codebook is based on Western government's functions, however, using it directly for analyzing Chinese textual data may introduce coding biases. To address this, we adopted an "inductive" approach by combining topic modeling with text coding for more contextually relevant analysis (Bayerlein et al, 2022). The reason for first using topic modeling instead of direct coding is that we cannot pre-determine the specific policy topics contained in the textual data and the relationships among them.…”

Delegation and stewardship in international organizations

“…By treating both sides seriously, we should learn more about how these actors interact with each other and what dynamics drive their behaviour both within and between these actors. A few very recent studies have already demonstrated the benefits of such perspective: showed how the lack of synchronized action between member states and IO administrations can lead to significant institutional failures; showed how member states' actions and IPAs' perception thereof contribute to the emergence of informal behaviour patterns in IOs; a study by Bayerlein et al (2020a) showed that the congruence between member states' and IPAs' policy agendas may vary depending on the extent to which member states delegate formal authority to IPAs as well as the extent to which IPAs' administrative cultures foster independent agenda developments. Hence, if such relational dynamics remain ignored, P-A approaches cannot unleash their explanatory power.…”