Symposium on Kristina daugirdas, “Reputation as a disciplinarian of international organizations” the company You Keep: International organizations and the reputational effects of membership

Abstract

Our contribution to this symposium speaks to the origins of international organization (IO) reputation. The one explored by Daugirdas is agency slack: when people delegated power and authority within an organization—in her example, UN peacekeepers and their surrounding bureaucracy—abuse their privilege and stain the institution’s character. We explore another that can spark similar reactions and consequences, but which emanates from the behavior of the principals themselves (rather than their agents): the member states. The company an IO keeps—how members behave—can bolster or stain the organization’s reputation. That in turn can have consequences, especially for organizations seeking to provide a venue for members to make credible commitments. Credible commitments are efforts to convince an audience that a promise is genuine. This is helpful when states alone cannot provide such guarantees. Participation in IOs allows states to, in essence, write binding-like contracts that reassure their audience(s) that they mean what they promise, and will pay a cost for reneging. That is, for example, part of the reason why states choose to delegate peacekeeping decisions to the UN. Unilaterally, they cannot credibly commit to be objective when strategic interests are at stake. But the extent to which delegation alleviates the problem depends ultimately on the behavior of the member states–similar to the agent story depicted by Daugirdas. And this idea aligns closely with Daugirdas’ premise that while a good reputation is valuable, a bad one is costly.1 While the logic we develop applies to many domains, we draw here upon our own research on foreign direct investment (FDI) to illustrate how “the company you keep” generates IO reputations that may have direct costs or benefits to the membership.