IGCC Series on Global Governance Featured in Review of International Organizations
This month, the Review of International Organizations published a special issue on Illiberal Regimes and International Organizations. The series, based on a collection of working papers published by the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), highlights how authoritarian governments and backsliding democracies are reshaping the liberal international order and forming new illiberal regional organizations to contest democratic norms.
“The series showcases the depth and breadth of expertise within the IGCC network on this issue,” says Christina Schneider, IGCC co-director for the Future of Democracy and professor of political science at UC San Diego. “As we show, the illiberal attack on liberal internationalism poses serious challenges for the future of global governance. Our research lays the foundations for addressing this threat.”
The UC San Diego-based leadership of IGCC’s Future of Democracy initiative is pushing forward new research on this theme as norm contestation comes to define a new phase of great power competition. The series in the Review of International Organizations, one of the most prestigious academic journals in the field of political science, is part of the initiative’s mission to foster forward-looking research that helps decisionmakers understand how multilateral institutions led by democracies are managing strong and coordinated influence campaigns from authoritarian and backsliding governments. The project also looks at how authoritarian-led regional organizations are challenging the liberal conception of global governance.
The series begins with an article by project leaders Christina Cottiero of the University of Utah and Emilie Hafner-Burton, Stephan Haggard, Lauren Prather, and Christina Schneider of UC San Diego, which lays out the theoretical framework for the project writ large. The paper puts forth an argument for why regime type matters in understanding states’ actions and objectives in multilateral institutions, and demonstrates how these institutions’ internal decision-making processes determine how influential illiberal regimes can be within them.
Anna Meyerrose of Arizona State and Irfan Nooruddin of Georgetown University continue with a broad look at the mechanics of how illiberal governments use their membership in international organizations to undermine them from within. Looking at voting data from the United Nations Human Rights Council, they observe how these regimes use the forum to redefine liberal norms in their favor.
Next, Jana Lipps and Marc Jacob of ETH Zurich use a case study of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to observe how norm contestation operates in practice. PACE has a long history of promoting liberal democratic values in Europe. But as membership in the assembly among illiberal parties has grown, that history is being challenged. Lipps and Jacob use an original dataset of 400,000 votes within PACE to observe how these parties are challenging PACE’s liberal consensus, deriving lessons on how these regimes threaten other such organizations.
Thomas Winzen of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf continues with a look at how backsliding democracies are impacting governance in the world’s foremost liberal regional organization, the European Union (EU). Winzen explores how illiberal regimes influence the EU legislative process, noting that while they do not necessarily oppose European integration per se, they engage in activities intended to obstruct the EU from taking on powers that could interfere with member states’ backsliding. He concludes that while the general business of legislating within the EU may largely be safe, illiberal actions pose longer-term risks to the resilience of Europe’s democratic norms.
Turning to authoritarian-dominated regional organizations, Hafner-Burton, Schneider, and Jon Pevehouse of the University of Wisconsin-Madison explore how these organizations operate—and why they adopt good governance measures that member states resist imposing domestically. Utilizing data from 48 primarily autocratic regional organizations between 1945-2015, they observe how these regional groups adopt good governance mandates—such as protecting human rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law—when pressured by outside liberal organizations but seek to shape those practices in-line with their own views, another example of redefining long-held norms.
Another paper by Kelly Morrison of the University of Tennessee, Daniela Donno of the University of Oklahoma, and Burcu Savun and Perisa Davutoglu of the University of Pittsburgh, examines a key area where authoritarian regional organizations are exercising malign influence over the practice of democracy—election observation missions. By exploring instances between 1990-2012 where authoritarian leaders invited “friendly” observers from authoritarian-led organizations, they argue that these missions—and their divergent appraisals of electoral integrity versus liberal observers—help leaders quell public opposition to otherwise questionable elections.
The concluding paper in the series by Sarah Bush of the University of Pennsylvania, Cottiero, and Prather explores the rise of such “zombie” election monitors to validate flawed elections. Using data from the first two decades of the 21st century, they find that authoritarian regional organizations are responsible for the proliferation of these zombie missions and warn that they could undermine the legitimacy of election observation.
Paddy Ryan is a senior writer and editor at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC). The Illiberal Regimes in International Organizations series in the Review of International Organizations is part of IGCC’s continued work on how illiberal regimes threaten to alter global governance. For more, click here.
Thumbnail credit: United Nations Headquarters (Flickr)