Beyond Politicisation: Patterns and Pathways of Democratic Rhetoric in the Legitimation of International Organisations

In the wake of public debates about the ‘democratic deficit’ of international institutions, many observers have either stated or assumed that democracy has become a more powerful normative yardstick in the evaluation of international organizations. In the context of such debates, our paper argues that the factors that give rise to democratic rhetoric include, but are not limited to, politicization resulting from gains in IO competences. First, it provides a systematic overview of the relative importance of democratic rhetoric in the self-descriptions and evaluations of five very diverse international organizations – the GATT/WTO, the IAEA, the IUCN, the OAU/AU and the UNHCR – over the past four decades. Doing so, it reveals considerable variation in the timing, extent and content of democracy-based justifications of an organization’s activities. Second, we use our data to examine the pathways on which democratic rhetoric travels within as well as across international organizations. More precisely, we initially test our evidence against the common argument that the delegation of additional competences to international organizations, via a politicization of the latter, leads to a demand for democratic procedures to which international organizations strategically adapt. Against this common wisdom, we also test three further arguments – first, that the rise of democracy is a cultural phenomenon that pervades world polity and hence applies to all international organizations in similar ways; second, that the rise of democratic rhetoric varies according to political cultures that are characteristic for different issue-areas; and third, that the pattern of democratic rhetoric in international organizations is best understood as resulting from to the strategic activities of specific actors who, making effective use of windows of opportunity, succeed at instigating normative change to foster their own interests.