The Politicization of International Organizations in Parliamentary Debates

Which international organizations (IOs) are most likely to be politicized in domestic politics? Why? And by whom? Existing scholarship posits a causal link between IO authority and politicization, yet empirical tests of this proposition are limited to single country or single IO case studies. This article presents a comparative study of IO politicization spanning considerable temporal, geographic, and IO variation. We track the salience of 75 IOs in six legislatures between 1991 and 2018 and provide the most complete evidence to date for the existence of an authority-politicization nexus in international politics. Crucially, we also show which type of authority matters most for the politicization of IOs. We find that find that increases in delegated authority have a larger effect on IO politicization than increases in pooled authority (delegated authority hypothesis), and that general purpose IOs are more likely to be politicized than task specific IOs. We also find that challenger parties - and in particular radical right parties - dedicate more of their parliamentary communication to IOs than mainstream parties. The article also contributes a new dataset of over 600,000 statements on IOs in parliamentary debates.