Political Responsiveness by Organisation? Analysing the Structural Volatility of the UN Bureaucracy, 1998ꟷ2018

The recent turn in international relations (IR) towards studying the bureaucratic apparatuses of international organizations echoes in many regards long-time debates in comparative public administration (PA) research at national level. So far, much attention has been paid to the influence and role (perceptions) of international bureaucracies in policy-making. Yet, these questions are inevitably linked to the more basic question of how international bureaucracies organize the politics-administration nexus and whether and to what extent the interactions between political and bureaucratic logics of action interact, as they do in domestic bureaucracies. Therefore, we seek to analyze the political determinants for the structural volatility of international bureaucracies, investigating the evolution of their inner organizational units that express both formal and functional boundaries and thus not only offer focal points for external actors but also shape considerably internal decision-making and the responsiveness of the line bureaucracy towards political signals from the member states as key principals. This paper conducts a first systematic analysis of this structural volatility within the various bureaucracies administering the UN system. Based on organizational charts, we trace all formal changes to the units inside these organizations over the past 20 years. Our dataset covers all entities supporting the UN General Assembly, all departments and offices supporting the UN Secretariat (except the UN offices in Geneva, Nairobi, and Vienna) as well as all entities administering the regional commissions. In total, we analyze approx. 50 bureaucratic organizations with all their internal units. Our dependent variable is the 'structural volatility' of these apparatuses, measured as the number of changes divided by the number of existing units for any given year. We perform descriptive statistical analyses (a) to show which parts of the UN bureaucracy are particularly stable and which are rather dynamic and also (b) to compare the three aforementioned groups administering slightly different principals to identify systematic differences. Moreover, we will perform logistic regressions to investigate the explanatory relevance of political signals by studying the effects of (c) membership shifts and changes in the political leadership of the UN entity as well as of (d) shifts in political priorities for these entities as expressed in programmatic budget shifts. We include several controls, including the units' size and its parent organization's age.