Bogging Down the Swamp: A Nested Analysis of Populist Policy Obstruction in International Organisations

This paper analyses how populist governments affect policymaking inside international organisations (IOs) once they are at the table rather than at the exit door. While high-profile cases of withdrawal dominate public debates, many populist-led governments remain embedded in IOs and can instead obstruct, dilute or redirect multilateral policymaking from within. The paper asks how populist member governments affect the policymaking performance of IOs. Theoretically, it conceptualises populism as popular opposition to the institutional status quo and distinguishes between sovereigntist and redistributive critiques of international governance. This generates expectations of a general obstructive effect on policy output, lower binding output under right-wing populist representation, and higher redistributive output under left-wing populist representation. Empirically, the paper follows a nested-analysis design. A preliminary large-N analysis combines comparative IO policy-output data with cross-national data on populist chief executives and estimates associations between populist representation and overall, binding and redistributive policy output across IOs between 1981 and 2011. The results provide qualified support for a general obstructive relationship and clearer support for the redistributive expectation, but no support for the expected reduction in binding policy. Lower overall output is concentrated among right-wing populist governments, while left-wing populist representation is associated with higher redistributive and binding output. These findings motivate a subsequent small-N analysis of selected pathway cases, designed to trace direct populist intervention and responses by other institutional actors across different stages of IO policymaking. The paper thereby moves from identifying whether populist participation affects what IOs produce towards explaining how these effects emerge and why they differ across forms of populism.