Nongovernmental voters in international organizations: Insights from the International Labour Organization

Global multilateral organizations are sometimes criticized for their intergovernmental institutional design. Even when certain non-state actors are granted some level of access, governments usually retain a monopoly of decision-making authority. This, it is argued, leaves important societal interests without effective representation in global policy making. Arguably, the problem would not be so serious if hypothetical non-governmental delegates from a country aligned themselves with government delegates from that same country whenever voting and other decisions are called for. We do not know if that would happen or not, because most global multilateral organizations do not give formal voting rights to non-governmental delegates by design – the International Labour Organization being a notable exception. Since its creation in 1919, the ILO has allowed representatives of workers and employers to vote on international labour legislation on the same footing as representatives of governments. The paper analyses an original dataset of relating to the voting choices made by individual delegates in relation to 159 votes taken in the ILO between 1966 and 2006. The main question examined in the paper is whether national tripartite delegations – i.e. the representatives of the government, the workers and the employers from each country - tend to be more cohesive in their voting behaviour than functional groups – i.e. the set of workers’, employers’ and government representatives from all countries. It finds that Worker delegates form a very cohesive group, which is normally more united than national delegations. Employers are more often divided. National delegations from democratic countries tend to be less cohesive, controlling for other political and economic factors that may affect national voting cohesion. The paper will conclude by discussion the implications of the findings on the ILO for the general question of whether and how a key design feature of most IOs - the governmental monopoly of formal decision-making powers - makes a difference in terms of political outcomes.