Strangers at the Gate: How Populists in Power Shape Global Governance through Accession to International Organisations

This paper investigates when states join international organisations (IOs) and how organisational environments condition that decision under populist incumbency. Rather than focusing on dramatic withdrawals or highly visible confrontations, it examines a quieter pathway through which domestic politics reshapes global governance: selective non-entry into IOs, which gradually alters the density, composition, and authority of institutional complexes. In line with the workshop’s focus on disruption, I treat altered accession patterns as one channel through which domestic changes in governing coalitions accumulate into shifts in the scope and authority of international institutions, even without formal retrenchment. I conceptualise populism primarily as a specific form of anti-institutionalism, a politics leveraging popular grievances against established institutional constraints, which may alter the calculus of committing to multilateral rules. I theorise how IO side characteristics, notably the degree of formalisation and the peer community of existing members, interact with domestic leadership type. Populist leaders should be especially reluctant to join formalised organisations with binding rules and liberal democratic ‘club’ organisations, but more open to looser, informal, or already contested IOs in which populist peers provide ideological cover. The study draws on a global sample of IOs and governments. It combines the Correlates of War IGO 3.0 dataset with additional information on informal IOs, member-state and community characteristics. Episodes of populist incumbency are identified from cross-national leader datasets. Event-history (Cox) models on country–IO dyads estimate how accession hazards vary across leadership type, IO formalisation, peer environments, and domestic covariates. A preliminary baseline analysis suggests a lower hazard of entry during periods of populist incumbency. These estimates are strictly provisional but signal feasibility. The paper contributes to the workshop theme by recasting populist governments as internal disruptors that reconfigure global governance not only through visible withdrawals, but also through stalled accessions. It identifies institutional designs and membership constellations that cushion or amplify this disruption, thereby speaking directly to questions about how domestic illiberal turns affect multilateral cooperation, under what conditions disruption leads to institutional thinning or fragmentation, and where opportunities remain for maintaining or rebuilding IO authority in hard times. By foregrounding accession as a locus of contestation, the paper links debates on IO authority, legitimacy and survival to scholarship on regime complexity and informal organisations, and it treats disruption not as a single critical juncture but as the cumulative outcome of many small membership decisions taken under shifting domestic political conditions.