Assessing and Explaining the Expert Authority of International Bureaucracies

International bureaucracies are often described as enjoying expert authority. In fact, their expert authority is almost uncontested among scholars who study international organizations. Yet, only a very few studies exist in which scholars assessed, measured and compared expert authority across international bureaucracies. If they did, they struggled with distinguishing expert authority from related concepts, such as influence or argumentation, and with capturing its very essence, that is its relational character, which is based on claims to expert authority by a given actor and their recognition by other actors. Moreover, hardly any study exists in which scholars attempted to explain expert authority and identify its determinants. Our research, of which we present the main findings in the paper, seeks to advance this scholarship. It does so by measuring, comparing and explaining variations in expert authority of different international bureaucracies at global scale and by using statistical methods. Our findings are based on regression analyses in which we use the results of an international elite survey to which – at the time of writing – we have received over 340 responses from officials in national authorities from roughly 100 countries across the world. Altogether, the responses add up to over 1.800 observations on the extent and the determinants of expert authority of international bureaucracies in agriculture and finance, including the World Bank, IMF, OECD, FAO and UNEP. In the regression analysis, we test several explanations for variations in expert authority, above all the neutrality of the international bureaucracies’ work, their relative advantage in cognitive resources and access to knowledge, their performance at global and national level, and the complexity and uncertainty in the policy field.