11:00 - 13:15
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Markus Stephan Tepe
Discussant/s:
Markus Stephan Tepe
Meeting Room G

Wenqing Huangfu, Tao Li, Xiangning Wu
Who Are Staffing the UN Organizations? Contributions, Connections and Ideologies.

Shenghao Zhang
UN peacekeeping contribution and status enhancement

Bernd Schlipphak, Constantin Schäfer, Oliver Treib
Authority Matters: Institutional Reforms, Cosmopolitanism, and the Public Legitimacy of International Organizations

David Weyrauch
Signalling disagreement or struggling to compromise? Analyzing abstention votes in the United Nations General Assembly.
Authority Matters: Institutional Reforms, Cosmopolitanism, and the Public Legitimacy of International Organizations
Bernd Schlipphak, Constantin Schäfer, Oliver Treib
University of Muenster, Department of Political Science

Does the public legitimacy of International Organizations (IOs) depend on their institutional settings? In this paper, we seek to provide an answer to these questions by focusing on the authority dimension of an IO’s institutional design. We argue that changes to scope of IO authority on two different sub-dimensions employ effects on the IO’s public legitimacy: the bindingness of policy decision and the majority/voting rules in the IO’s governing body. More specifically, we hypothesize that the direction of effects varies between citizens with higher and lower levels of cosmopolitanism – somewhere else aptly described as, “Anywheres” and “Somewheres”. While the cosmopolitan-minded Anywheres should prefer higher levels of IO authority, the communitarian-minded Somewheres should be more favorable towards lower authority levels. We test our expectations by conducting a self-administered factorial survey experiments in six different countries. The empirical results support our arguments and imply that the effectiveness of IO reforms in regard to public legitimacy might feed into the cosmopolitan-communitarian societal cleavage.