Bogging Down the Swamp: Populist Governments and 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 instead slow, dilute, or redirect multilateral decisions from within. The paper asks whether and when populist participation in IO decision-making bodies reduces policy output and shifts it away from costly redistributive and institutional governance issues toward less binding, more symbolic acts. Theoretically, the paper develops an account of populism as a mode of anti-institutional representation: leaders present themselves as delegates of a popular unconstrained mandate, sanctioned by their election and directly corresponding to the will of the people, which makes compromise in pluralist forums harder to justify. Building on this logic, it expects IOs in which populists hold pivotal positions to adopt fewer acts on average, especially on redistributive or institutional questions, and to rely more heavily on non-binding instruments, compared to similar IO–years without such involvement. Empirically, the paper combines the Intergovernmental Policy Output Dataset (IPOD), which codes more than 37,000 acts adopted by 13 multipurpose IOs between 1980 and 2015, with cross-national data on populist chief executives. Negative binomial models with IO and year fixed effects relate annual policy counts (overall and by issue area and bindingness) to different thresholds of populist representation in decision-making, while accounting for international crises and ideological polarisation among member states. The paper contributes to debates on populist impact, cooptation, and IO resilience by identifying conditions under which populist participation primarily generates obstruction and when IOs appear able to absorb or channel populist demands without major losses in policy output.