International Bureaucracies as Runaway Agents? How Organizational Structure Affects Agency Slack

在过去几十年中，各国将广泛的决策权下放给国际组织的行政机构。这些国际官僚机构正在制定议程，参与决策过程，实施政策计划，在国际组织中代表国家，创建新的监管机构，甚至解决国家之间的争端。在逐步赋予权力的过程中，监督机制也有所增加，因为在某些情况下，成员国认为国际官僚机构采取了违背其意图的行动，超越了其任务规定（机构松弛）。因此，国际官僚机构有时被描绘成逃脱其委托人（成员国）控制的失控代理人。这就为研究全球治理中的国际官僚机构提出了一个关键问题：国际组织的秘书处在什么情况下会出现机构懈怠，偏离其任务规定，并以其负责人意想不到的方式行事？为了解决这个问题，本项目采用了适合于测试和进一步发展委托代理理论的多方法研究方法。我们采用模糊集定性比较分析和模糊集理想类型分析进行系统的跨案例比较，随后，过程跟踪深入研究选定的国际官僚机构，其中每一个分析特定的政策。我们测试了我们的理论预期27个国际官僚机构，在那里我们收集数据的四个组织特征：碎片化，人员配备规则，缓冲和渗透性。所选择的方法将使我们能够调查的必要和充分条件发生的代理松弛，以确定潜在的因果机制，并评估替代解释的可行性。从该项目中获得的见解将使我们能够映射不同的代理松弛模式，并解释在哪些组织结构下，国际官僚机构的行为违背了他们的校长的偏好。通过比较不同的国际官僚机构来展示组织结构的重要性，将丰富委托代理理论，并帮助我们弥合理论思考与该领域实证工作之间的差距。

Over the past decades states have delegated extensive decision-making authority to the administrative bodies of international organizations. These international bureaucracies are setting agendas, participate in decision-making processes, implement policy programs, represent states in international organizations, create new regulatory agencies, and even settle disputes among states. Their gradual process of empowerment has been accompanied by an increase in oversight mechanisms, as member states, in some cases, considered that international bureaucracies had undertaken actions contrary to their intentions and overstepped their mandates (agency slack). Accordingly, international bureaucracies are sometimes portrayed as runaway agents that escaped the control of their principals (member states). This prompts a key question for research on international bureaucracies in global governance: under what conditions do secretariats of international organizations engage in agency slack, deviating from their mandate and acting in a way unintended by their principals?To address this question, this project takes a Multi-Method Research approach that is suited to test and further develop principal-agent theory. We employ fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis and fuzzy-set ideal type analysis for a systematic cross-case comparison and, subsequently, process-tracing for an in-depth study of selected international bureaucracies, each of which are analyzed for specific policies. We test our theoretical expectations on 27 international bureaucracies, where we gather data on four organizational characteristics: fragmentation, staffing rules, buffering, and permeability. The chosen approach will allow us to investigate necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of agency slack, to identify underlying causal mechanisms, and to assess the plausibility of alternative explanations. The insights gained from the project will enable us to map different patterns of agency slack and explain under which organizational structures international bureaucracies act against their principals preferences. Showing how organizational structure matters by comparing different international bureaucracies will enrich principal-agent theory and help us bridge the gap between theoretical considerations and empirical work in the field.