The tyranny of the majority? How pooled and delegated authority shape exit from international organizations

The authority of international organizations (IOs) is generally assumed to drive their member states’ contestation even to the point that they terminate their membership. We provide a first systematic assessment of this relationship and suggest that the type of IO authority matters. IOs with pooled authority exert centrifugal effects on their membership since minorities are more likely confronted with adversarial majority decisions. By contrast, IOs with delegated authority exert centripetal effects as they promote non-majoritarian decisions that tend to accommodate the broader membership. A logistic regression analysis drawing on fine-grained information on the pooling and delegation of authority for major IOs supports our claim: Withdrawal is significantly more likely the more authority is pooled, and significantly less likely the more it is delegated. Our findings yield important implications for IO resilience in times of heightened contestation. Rather than driving exit, delegation can help to curb the escalation of contestation.