The Independence of International Institutions: A New Indicator and an Application to Global Financial Regulation

The independence or autonomy of international institutions from national governments as their principals (governors) is of major concern to scholars in IR. In this paper, we propose a new conceptualization of autonomy that can be empirically operationalized and applied to the full variety of international institutions (from formal intergovernmental organizations to informal institutions, such as transgovernmental networks or private institutions). Our concept analytically distinguishes three dimensions of autonomy: (1) Who is authority delegated to (actors and bodies)? (2) What competences do the bodies hold (authority)? (3) How does the collective principal take decisions (pooling)? We operationalize these three dimensions in five distinct parameters, and show that the interrelations between them determine the degree of independence an institution enjoys. Our conceptualization bridges an unnecessary and analyt-ically incomplete divide between classical IR scholars on the one hand and IPE respectively global governance scholars on the other. While the former are predominantly concerned with the authority and control dimensions, the latter have focused mainly on the actors and bodies dimension pointing out that new kinds of actors, e.g. private and bureaucratic, and new modes of governance play an increasing role in international politics. We apply our concept empiri-cally and present a new dataset measuring the independence of 25 global regulatory institu-tions in finance from 1963 to 2017. Global regulatory bodies in finance exhibit remarkable institutional variation with respect to their actor composition (public and private actors, politi-cians and bureaucrats), competences (binding policies or recommendations) and decision-making (consensus or majority) over time and across bodies. The field is thus ideal to demon-strate the usefulness of our indicator. We propose (preliminary) explanations for the variation of independence of regulatory bodies across institutions and time.