Over the past decade, international organizations’ (IO) bureaucratic interior increasingly has surfaced as a distinct objective in academic research on public administration and international relations. As we know from research on domestic administrations, bureaucrats, in addition to their political masters, have great influence on the contents and the ways of policy-making. Addressing this influence, this paper dwells on the concept of “administrative styles”, understood here as the processes and routines that characterize the behavior and activities of administrative bodies. Addressing administrative styles at the international level, the authors address two very different IOs: The EU Commission, one of the most powerful international bureaucracies and the OSCE secretariat, a rather small institution with limited policy powers. The authors find that despite these differences, both international bureaucracies are highly similar in their administrative styles. The paper ends with a theoretical outlook on bureaucratic behavior and bureaucratic influence on global public policy.
