The Power of Bureaucratic Experts: Why Regional Intergovernmental Organisations Have Parliaments

Treaty making is ordinarily assumed to be the business of nation-states. National governments are seen as first determining their interests and then negotiating with each other in order to produce a final document that reflects those interests. However, there is growing evidence in international relations, for example in recent work by Tana Johnson (2013), that international bureaucrats are widely involved in the institutional design of the majority of international organisations. What is less evident is how critical a difference they can make to the outcomes of institutional design processes. In a sense, are there systematic differences that we can see when international organisations are designed by bureaucratic experts rather than national governments? This paper provides evidence for the significant influence that international bureaucrats can have on the design of regional intergovernmental organisations. It does so by looking at why some regional organisations have parliaments while others do not. For example, the Arab League and the African Union respectively established the Arab Parliament and the Pan-African Parliament; meanwhile others in more democratic regions, such as the Organization of American States, continue to resist creating such organs. Given this surprising variation, democratic consolidation alone appears to have little to do with the emergence of these institutions. Based on field research at prominent African regional intergovernmental organisations such as the AU and SADC, this paper argues that regional parliaments were established in regional organisations where bureaucratic experts dominated the drafting of the treaties, while in contexts where no regional parliaments were created it was because the member states controlled the treaty drafting process. Specifically, when member states experienced a broad form of uncertainty and the regional organisations were also of very low salience, experts from the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) were given significant discretion to design the treaties. They used this discretion to not just provide technical expertise, but to more broadly define the fundamental problems and purposes of the organisation according to their democratic causal ideas and subsequently proposed regional parliaments as one of the solutions. This argument builds upon insights from alternative explanations, such as rational design and diffusion, but brings unique evidence of the systematic difference that bureaucratic experts have made in the design of regional organisations in Africa.