Informal Institutional Design and Autocratization in Regional Organizations

Research on international organizations (IOs) has long expected regime type to shape institutional design. Democracies and autocracies are theorized to hold systematically different preferences for delegation, pooling, and access, and shifts toward autocratization should therefore be reflected in the rules governing IOs. Yet empirical studies find little evidence that recent waves of autocratization have altered the formal design of IOs. These features remain remarkably stable even as many member states have undergone significant political change. This paper asks why formal design appears so resilient and what forms of adaptation states pursue instead. We argue that a key part of the answer lies beyond formal rules: autocratizing states increasingly rely on informal institutional practices within IOs to pursue their preferences, circumvent constraints, and reshape cooperation without engaging in costly formal reform. We conceptualize informality as operating within three institutional domains that parallel well-established dimensions of formal design: participation (informal control over access and influence for non-state actors), delegation (informal strategies affecting staffing, leadership, and bureaucratic autonomy), and decision-making (informal consensus norms, backchannel negotiations, and procedural obstruction). While both democracies and autocracies employ informal practices, they do so for different purposes. Democracies rely on informality to enable cooperation and navigate domestic veto players. Autocratizing regimes instead use informality in a constraint-inhibiting way to protect sovereignty, reduce oversight, and limit accountability without seeking formal rule changes. Empirically, the paper conducts a comparative analysis of four regional organizations: the Organization of American States (OAS), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the African Union (AU), and the European Union (EU). Each is paired with a recently autocratized member state (Brazil, Indonesia, Tunisia, and Hungary). This design allows us to trace how autocratization affects state behavior across different institutional contexts while minimizing variation in the formal design of IOs. The focus on state-level strategies also enables us to identify informal practices that may not meaningfully alter IO-wide averages but nonetheless shape organizational procedures. Across cases, we examine how autocratizing governments deploy informal strategies to influence participation (e.g., restricting critical NGOs while promoting GONGOs), to reshape delegation (e.g., politicizing staffing pipelines or leveraging leadership posts), and to manipulate decision-making (e.g., invoking informal consensus to dilute or block decisions on democracy and human rights). Preliminary evidence suggests that these informal strategies create a significant gap between formal institutional design and de facto governance practices. This helps explain not only why formal design appears stable despite regime change, but also how institutional norms may nonetheless shift in practice. By theorizing and comparing informal institutional design across regional organizations, the paper contributes to research on IO governance, regime type, and the consequences of autocratization. It shows that the effects of regime change are often visible not in treaty reform but in the expansion of informal practices within IOs.