How International Organizations (Re)produce Political Worlds: Analyzing IOs’ Internal Complexities

International organizations (IOs) have been strongly expanding over the past decades. This includes not only their global and regional proliferation, policy mandates, and formal authority, but also their internal organizational complexity. Today, most IOs include not only governmental delegations and bureaucracies, but also in some combination parliamentary assemblies, courts, and civil society bodies, amongst others. To approach this phenomenon, this paper asks why international organizations have been increasing their internal, formal complexities. It argues, that IOs (re)produce their specific surrounding political worlds by incorporating diverse organizational models representing different knowledge systems of political societies. These knowledge systems are legitimate and culturally formed organizational models widely shared in modern, liberal societies. They stabilize IOs’ performances and decisions by helping to (re)produce selected understandings about their world and generate world ordering concepts, such as policies. This study identifies five organizational models found in contemporary IOs: intergovernmental, bureaucratic, parliamentary, judicial, and civil society bodies. The empirical analysis finds support for this understanding of IOs and internal complexity: patterns across IO types and cultural-cognitive factors such as diffusion and time-sequencing processes are systematically associated with IOs’ increasing internal complexities. These findings build on a new, original data set of 97 IOs covering 145 years documenting internal formal political structures. The empirical analysis uses typology-based descriptive inference and survival analysis modeling techniques gauging multi-layered organizational change processes. Thus, this study treats IOs as genuine organizational actors and expands insights on IO internal designs in relation to their larger environmental political worlds.