The Effect of Institutional Design on IOs’ Ability to Deal with Challenges: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment of Experts

International Organizations (IOs) face mounting pressures stemming from geopolitical conflict, shifting power balances, and renewed contestation of multilateralism. The second Trump administration has intensified these dynamics through withdrawals from IOs and substantial budget cuts, aggravating existing gridlock, resource shortages, and challenges to legitimacy. While prior scholarship documents how such pressures may lead to IO decline, zombification, or termination, it also highlights notable resilience across many organizations. Existing research, however, leaves three gaps: insufficient differentiation between types of challenges confronting IOs, limited understanding of how specific institutional characteristics interact with distinct challenges, and uncertainty about whether insights drawn from historical data remain valid in the current political context. This paper addresses these gaps by examining how institutional characteristics impact IOs’ capacity to survive and continue carrying out their mandates under different challenges. We distinguish between three key challenges—policy gridlock, state withdrawal, and resource crises. We rely on an original expert survey (n = 763) incorporating a conjoint experiment, fielded in August–September 2025. In a conjoint experiment, experts evaluated pairs of fictional IOs that systematically varied in institutional characteristics related to effectiveness, governance autonomy, and participation. The experts assessed their likelihood of survival and mandate fulfillment when confronted with specific challenges. Our findings demonstrate that state compliance emerges as a key feature. Yet, most institutional characteristics do not have uniform effects across challenges. Reaction speed is particularly relevant when IOs face resource crises, while independent policy initiatives by IO leadership help most to break gridlock. Overall, the study advances debates on institutional design and IO resilience by clarifying which institutional characteristics matter most in the current (geo)political context.