Deliberation in International Organizations: The Benefits and Limits of Arguing

Deliberation is ubiquitous in political activity and behavior. Indeed, political theorists have long recognized the centrality of deliberation for understanding politics in general, and for democracy in particular. Similarly, world politics is full of communicative action. The consequences of arguing in international relations are ill-understood, however, in part because accounts of decision-making of international organizations-one set of key actors in global governance-abstract from incorporating deliberation in their analyses. Instead, preferences of actors are usually taken as given. It therefore remains largely unknown whether arguing can deliver on its promise of improved governance-as developed by scholarship in deliberative democracy. This paper directly speaks to such debates and investigates the conditions under which arguing is consequential in international organizations, while taking into account the asymmetric distribution of power in international institutions. Drawing on work from deliberative democracy, I develop conjectures about the effectiveness of deliberation applicable to the realm of global economic governance. I then test these hypotheses on meetings in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pertaining to lending programs between 1995 and 2009. In doing so, I introduce a new measure of deliberative quality based on dictionary methods and machine learning techniques. Subsequently, I employ regression analysis to examine whether higher deliberative quality is associated with a more holistic approach to lending programs, as reflected in a broader scope of policy reforms. The findings have important implications for IMF governance and for international organizations more broadly. The research questions the widely-used approach of deriving preferences exogenously to the decision-making process, but also shows the limitations of studying deliberation within organizations.