The Spread of Bureaucratic Oversight Mechanisms across Intergovernmental Organizations

The study asks why so many intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) have established recently offices and policies intended to facilitate the oversight of their bureaucracies. It begins from a set of hypotheses derived from the principal-agent (PA) literature, a natural starting point for answering this question. It then considers explanations based on norms and institutional diffusion to offer a more complete explanation of developments. The study argues that the empowerment of democratic norms and institutional diffusion processes across IGOs have altered member-states’ preferences and allowed them to overcome collective action problems involved in the adoption of oversight mechanisms. The hypotheses are tested across more than 70 organizations. The results suggest that arguments extracted from the PA literature and the one on norms allow us to understand which IGOs are more likely to have bureaucratic oversight mechanisms. On the other hand, models that also take into account diffusion processes allow us to understand better when such mechanisms are adopted.本研究旨在探究为何近年来众多政府间国际组织（intergovernmental organizations, IGOs）纷纷设立旨在强化其官僚机构监督职能的办事处与配套政策。本研究首先从委托-代理（principal-agent, PA）理论文献中衍生出一系列假说，这亦是解答该问题的天然切入点。随后，本研究引入基于规范与制度扩散的解释框架，以期为相关发展提供更为全面的阐释。本研究主张，民主规范的强化以及政府间国际组织间的制度扩散进程，已然改变了成员国的政策偏好，并使其得以克服在采纳监督机制过程中面临的集体行动困境。本研究对70余家此类组织开展了假说检验。结果显示，源自委托-代理理论与规范研究的论证框架，能够帮助我们厘清哪些政府间国际组织更有可能设立官僚监督机制。另一方面，同时纳入制度扩散因素的模型，则能让我们更好地理解这类监督机制的具体采纳时机。