Research as a Response Mechanism to Politicization - A Comparative Study of International Organizations

International governmental organizations are not research institutions. Nevertheless, some are active producers of research, and the extent to which they produce research differs between organizations. My paper focuses on why this is the case. The organization's need for legitimacy is one mechanism that leads to higher research output. International organizations have legitimacy when they have the normative right to rule and when those subject to their rule accept their legitimacy (Buchanan and Keohane 2006, Beetham 2013, Tallberg et al. 2014, Ecker-Ehrhardt 2018, Dingwerth et al. 2020, Zürn et al. 2012, Zürn 2018). Legitimacy can be lost when international organizations gain more authority (Rauh and Zürn 2020, Schmidtke and Lenz 2022) and when the public questions whether the international organization is acting in the public interest or favors the interests of a “global elite” or a particular member state (Foot et al. 2003, Clark 2005, Clark 2009, Frost 2013, Dellmuth and Schlipphak 2020). In response, international organizations engage in a "politics of legitimacy" (Clark 2005, Reus-Smit 2007). International organizations use various means to justify their policies and generate legitimacy (Tallberg et al. 2014, Dingwerth et al. 2020): They centralize their public communication (Ecker-Ehrhardt 2018), adopt specific narratives of global economic governance (Rauh and Zürn 2020), or include democratic narratives in annual reports (Dingwerth et al. 2015). Literature on the research activities of international organizations as a legitimation tool is scarce (Zapp 2020, for the related concept of "expert authority" Busch and Liese 2016). Most focus on individual organizations (Broad 2006, Boswell 2008, Dethier 2009). I argue that international organizations strategically use their research to communicate with the public. By presenting research-based arguments, international organizations seek to enhance the credibility of their policy recommendations, build support for their goals, and justify their policies (Pawson 2006). International organizations use research to influence national and international decision-making, shape the discourse on critical issues, and influence member states, NGOs, the media, academics, and ultimately the public (Nay 2012, Schmidtke 2019). In addition, international organizations that engage in research seek an inherent sense of legitimacy, regardless of the specific content of the research. Research enhances the authority of international organizations. I argue that the more international organizations are contested, the more they turn to research. For the empirical analysis, I analyze the research output of 67 international organizations selected based on the "Measure of International Authority" (MIA) dataset (Hooghe and Marks 2015, 2017). I use negative binomial regression analysis to identify the factors determining the number of articles recorded on the Web of Science. To substantiate my argument, I focus on public protests captured in the 'politicization' variable of the MIA dataset. This is controlled for the research mandate, type, adjacent tasks, and organization size. Overall, I find that politicization increases the number of research articles of an organization in a small but significant way. Thus, this project contributes to the literature on international bureaucracies' attempts to legitimize themselves.