Influence of International Bureaucracies on Domestic Policy-Making. Determining and Assessing their Capacity as Agents of Policy Transfer

For little more than a decade, international bureaucracies have been conceptualized and stud-ied as distinct organizational entity in international organizations. Nowadays, their status as autonomous actors with independent influence within international organizations and in inter-national politics is almost uncontested. Their influence on domestic policymaking has however been neglected. In my research, I seek to advance this scholarship by studying and comparing the potential of international bureaucracies to exert a specific form of influence on domestic policy-making: their influence as agents of non-hierarchical policy transfers, that is as actors who transfer policies to states without resorting to legal or coercive means, e.g. by enforcing collectively binding agreements or using conditionality. In this paper, I propose an analytical framework for assessing and comparing the respective capacity of international bureaucracies and illustrate its empirical usefulness. To this end, I first and foremost theorize and operationalize in four steps the capacity of international bureaucracies to successfully export policies to as many states as possible, thereby ultimately contributing to the diffusion of policies in the international system. First, I elaborate on the premises of my undertaking. On the one hand, I do so by showing that international bureaucracies can be theorized as and were found to be autonomous actors with independent influence. On the other hand, I do so by exemplifying that they are actively engaged in activities to transfer policies to states. Second, I reveal that the capacity of interna-tional bureaucracies (and also of international organizations) to act as agents of non-hierarchical policy transfers is not only undertheorized but also hardly investigated in research on international organizations and policy transfer alike. Third, I theorize the respective ca-pacity of international bureaucracies by proposing a set of capabilities that they should ideally command in order to successfully transfer policies to as many states as possible. Given the state of related research, I can only do so by drawing on related findings in policy transfer research, namely its theoretical considerations and empirical results on the circumstances and dynamics that facilitate voluntary policy imports by states (including insights into the role of policy characteristics and specific situations for policy transfers as well as underlying causal mechanisms and policy-makers’ motivations and logics of actions). They provide the best starting point, since international bureaucracies need to be able to exploit these circumstances and dynamics in order to successfully export policies to states. Fourth, I operationalize the capacity of international bureaucracies to act as agents of non-hierarchical policy transfers. From the previous considerations, I therefore derive structural characteristics that international bureaucracies should feature to succeed as agents of policy transfers. The operationalization boils down to two characteristics: the existence of country offices (or projects) with own staff and a system of regular and country-specific analyses on domestic policy-making across as many states as possible. Finally, I illustrate the usefulness of this operationalization by mapping a set of international bureaucracies along these features and by ranking their capacity to successfully export policies to as many states as possible without using hierarchical means.