Power, Function or Legitimacy? Examining and Explaining the Staffing Patterns of International Organizations

Research holds that international organizations (IOs) are generally driven by three broad forces: (1) domination by powerful member states who have privileged formal and informal access, (2) functionalist efforts to enhance effective mandate delivery, and (3) legitimacy concerns about equal access and representation. Drawing on a newly composed data set on both the national origins and geographical duty-stations of IOs’ bureaucrats, we examine to what extend IOs’ aggregated staffing patterns correspond to the respective theories. In line with previous research, we find that staffing patterns substantially differ depending on whether the organization performs a regulative or operational task and that low-income states are generally overrepresented in operational IOs. Factoring in bureaucrats’ duty stations, however, we find that IOs’ international staff is often not located in the country or region they are recruited from. Thus, functionalist claims that operational IOs employ low-income country personnel to access ‘soft’ information about the countries in which they operate are not supported by this finding. Rather it suggests that concerns about legitimacy do play a major role in bureaucratic staffing and recruitment processes.