Rethinking International Organizations as Representative Institutions

One of the most fundamental changes in countries around the world is the rise of ‘new’ voices that seek public representation: from minority and marginalized groups via the culturally deprived towards future generations, animals and uninhabited nature. Lively literatures in political theory, comparative politics, organizational science, communication studies and beyond have sought to come to grips with this development, but its international dimension is widely neglected. How is representation in international governmental organizations (IGOs) – the most institutionalized setting of international politics – changing, why, and with what consequences? This project will lay the conceptual, theoretical and empirical foundations for rethinking IGOs as representative institutions by (1) leveraging recent conceptual-theoretical advances in political theory and (2) exploiting latest developments in quantitative and qualitative methodology. The proposed research programme has three parts: (a) the creation of a comprehensive measure of the system of institutional representation in 50 IGOs from 1950 to 2025 as a means to study the determinants of cross-sectional and temporal variation; (b) the identification of representative claims made by state actors in the same 50 IGOs from 1999 to 2024 as one of the system’s major outputs, using it to analyse how institutional and discursive representation relate; and (c) a detailed comparative analysis of the causal mechanisms by which ‘new’ constituencies emerge in a paradigmatic and inferentially powerful case: the representation of future generations in the United Nations and the African Union. Progress in mapping and explaining representation across IGOs and time promises not only a deeper understanding of an important change in the character and structure of IGOs but will offer new insights into patterns of international stratification and inequality; enable revisiting enduring questions about how community is constructed and changes in international politics; and allow for a re-assessment of the democratic deficit in world politics.