1) "Voting Alignment in Multilateral Negotiations: Why Small States Change Their Voting Behavior"
Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Diana Panke
Guest Researcher: Dr. Samuel Brazys
Research Assistants: Stephanie Pollhammer, Anna Lena Mohrmann
Sponsor: Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Duration of the project: October 2013 - July 2014
Sovereignty is an important building block of the modern international state system and the number of sovereign states increased to about 200 during the last two centuries. Today, sovereign states cooperate in a broad range of policy areas and cooperation is institutionalized in more than 5.000 International Organizations (IOs) and regimes. Although formally equal at the international level, states differ in multiple respects, most notably in their financial resources (economic size). The research group seeks to shed light on the behavior of small states in multilateral negotiations. More precisely, it examines the rationales underlying the voting behavior of small states. Can bigger states, especially developmental aid donors, ‘buy’ the support of smaller aid recipient states and if so under which conditions? What additional considerations guide the voting behavior of small states and changes thereof? To answer these questions, the research group develops a theoretical push-pull model on voting rationales of states and tests it comprehensively with a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. To this end, we draw on the United Nations General Assembly. It is a good testing ground to analyze vote-buying as it is the IO with the largest worldwide membership; accordingly, major developmental donors and recipients negotiate at the same table.
2) "Regional Organizations: Bystanders or Shapers of International Politics?"
Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Diana Panke
Research Assistants: Alena Hahn, Thomas Krebs, Anna Lena Mohrmann
Sponsor: Research Innovation Fund, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Duration of the project: August 2013 - April 2014
Regional organizations (ROs) have evolved in all parts of the globe. While most ROs started with economic cooperation between their member states, single case studies, especially on the EU, show that ROs are now also active beyond their borders. Yet, we do not know much about the magnitude of the phenomenon of ROs international engagement and nothing about whether ROs’ external actions are about to or have already created a regionalization of international politics. Thus as a first step toward a more comprehensive analysis of an RO driven regionalization of international politics, in which a relatively small number of regional actors rather than a relatively big number of individual nation-states play an essential role in international relations generally and in shaping international norms specifically, the project “Regional Organizations: Bystanders or Shapers of International Politics?” puts the extent to which ROs are prepared to be active beyond their borders into a comparative perspective and studies trends over time. Did competencies and capacities for external policies of ROs increase over time? Are some ROs better equipped than others to turn into international actors? Are some ROs better suited to be international shapers for some external polices, while they tend to be bystanders in others?
3) "Voice Without Vote- Herausforderungen für den Europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialausschuss und den Ausschuss der Regionen? Der Einfluss beratender Ausschüsse im Vergleich"
Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Diana Panke and Prof. Dr. Christoph Hönnige (University of Göttingen)
Research Assistants: Cormac Duffy, Edwina Hanbidge, Lucie Langer, Stephen Massey, Mary Naughton, Ekaterina Solovieva
Sponsor: Thyssenstiftung, Duration of the project: November 2010 - October 2012
There are hardly any political systems in and beyond the nation-state that do not incorporate committees. While decision-taking committees are often in the limelight of research, we do not know much about consultative committees, although they are as wide-spread as decision-taking committees. Consultative committees have access to decision-making arenas and can givenonbinding advice to political decision-makers, but do not possess formal voting power.
This project sheds light on the influence of consultative committees and addresses the following research question: How and under which conditions can consultative committees exert influence although they have a voice, but no vote?
In the current stage of the project, we developed a sender-receiver model that is based on the notion that consultative committees as senders offer information in exchange for influence to legislative actors as receivers. From the model, we derived a set of hypotheses specifying demand and supply sides of the information-influence nexus. In using the European Union with its two consultative committees (the Committee of the Regions (CoR), the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) as an empirical example, we comprehensively test the hypotheses with a mixed methods approach. This reveals that information supply of the CoR and the EESC has to match an information demand on the side of the European legislative actors (the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament) for the former to be influential. This is most likely if senders produce recommendations quickly that reflect a high level of expertise, whilst receivers have flexible preferences and lack administrative capacities to gather policy-specific expertise themselves.
4) "The General Assembly of the United Nations. How Size-Differences Influence Negotiation Activities and Prospects for Success of Member States"
Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Diana Panke
Research Assistants: Sally Hayden, Finbar Hefferon, Christopher Lute, Adiran O‘Hagan
Sponsoring through different Sub-projects: Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, UCD Seed Funding, Thyssenstiftung, Duration of the project: June 2010 - December 2012
Most international organisations (IOs) are based on the principle of sovereign equality, according to which all member states have equal rights and equal weights in the policy-initiation, negotiation and decision-taking stages of an IO’s policy cycle. However, while the states are formally equal, they differ immensely with regards to the financial and staff capacities that they can utilise when participating in the policy-cycle, and the resources that they can draw on when trying to be influential in negotiations and successful when it comes to passing hard or soft law. For example, in the United Nations in New York, states with small delegations of less than five diplomats, such as Somalia, Sao Tome and Principe, Papua New Guinea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands, Timor-Leste, Palau or Dominica, face diplomatic missions more than ten times their size, such as the US, Russia, China, Germany or Japan, that can additionally draw on over a thousand times more financial resources than the smaller states.
This project analyses the role played by size-related capacity differences in the active and effective participation of states in multilateral negotiations whose decision-making rules are based on the equality-of-states principle. Empirically, it draws on the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). The UNGA is the ideal testing ground for the effect of capacities on the conduct of states, as is not only the IO with the highest number of member states, but also of the six principal organs of the United Nations, it is the one that most strongly expresses the sovereign equality of states. The institutional rules guiding the UNGA’s policy cycle strongly reflect the equality principle, most notably in the procedures governing policy-initiation, negotiation participation, and as the one-state, one-vote rule in the decision-taking stage. At the same time, the member states are very heterogeneous concerning financial, staff, administrative and political and ideational capacities, as microstates face very big states.
Thus, the project sheds light on the antagonistic relationship between formal rules and factual capacity differences and answers the following research questions: Is the institutionalised equality-of-states principle an effective equaliser in IOs or are bigger and better equipped states in a more superior position than smaller and poorer states when it comes to actively participating and effectively making their voices heard in multilateral negotiations? What type of capacities influence a state’s ability to actively participate in the policy-initiation, the negotiation and the decision-taking stages of a policy cycle in an IO? Are smaller states less active than bigger ones? To what extent do size-related capacity differences translate into differences in influence over the content of policies and into differences in the prospects of successfully passing resolutions? Are smaller states as influential in the negotiation stage and as successful in the decision-taking stage as their bigger counterparts in IOs that are based on the principle of sovereign equality of states?
