When Autocracies Dominate International Organizations: Evidence from the UN Committee on NGOs

Scholars have documented a global trend toward autocratization and demonstrated that autocracies increasingly use their influence to shape decisions in international organizations (IOs). But what happens when autocratic states become so influential that they dominate decision-making in IOs and which types of outcomes emerge in such IOs? The study presents a novel theory on authoritarian influence in IOs, which argues that an interplay of IOs’ (i) thematic focus, (ii) membership composition, and (iii) decision rules explains the scale of authoritarian influence. The theory further highlights when member selection processes within the UN’s regional groups can result in disproportionate autocratic representation in IOs. The study leverages evidence from two original datasets on the decisions of the UN Committee on NGOs between 1998 and 2024 to test how the theorized conditions can translate into authoritarian influence in practice. Multi-pronged evidence demonstrates that autocracies have effectively seized the UN Committee on NGOs and exploit it to systematically defer and reject the applications of liberal NGOs. A comparative analysis with the ECOSOC and across a large set of IOs demonstrates that the disproportionate representation of autocracies in the Committee drives these outcomes. The study contributes to our understanding of illiberal challenges to the liberal international order with a new theory, original data, and novel empirical evidence.