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

在过去几十年中，各国向国际组织的行政机构授予了广泛的决策权。这些国际官僚机构正在制定议程，参与决策过程，执行政策方案，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。它们逐步增强权力的过程伴随着监督机制的增加，因为在某些情况下，会员国认为国际官僚机构采取了与其意图相反的行动，并越权(机构松懈)。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。这为全球治理中的国际官僚机构研究提出了一个关键问题：国际组织的秘书处在什么条件下存在机构松懈、偏离其授权并以其委托人意想不到的方式行事的情况？为了解决这个问题，本项目采用了一种适合测试和进一步发展委托代理理论的多方法研究方法。我们使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，并随后使用过程跟踪对选定的国际官僚机构进行深入研究，每个机构都被分析为具体的政策。我们在27个国际机构上测试了我们的理论预期，在这些机构中，我们收集了关于四个组织特征的数据：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机构松懈发生的必要条件和充分条件，确定潜在的因果机制，并评估替代解释的合理性。从该项目中获得的见解将使我们能够绘制不同的机构松懈模式，并解释国际官僚机构在哪些组织结构下采取违背其委托人偏好的行动。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考虑和该领域的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.