Preferences for Representation and Responsiveness in International Bureaucracies: a Survey Experiment

International bureaucracies with executive mandates play a crucial role in contemporary international organizations. They facilitate global and/or regional governance in sectors that are characterized both by high technical and increasing political complexity. As a consequence, they have the difficult task of balancing responsible governance with responsiveness to (trans)national publics that are represented via a plethora of channels. While prior research has shed some light on how these administrations navigate this challenge at the organizational level, we know little about the views from within these administrations on these matters. We remedy this by presenting results from a new pre-registered survey and vignette experiment conducted among experts and policy elites working in EU and global administrations. We theorize, map and explain these preferences in terms of their views on representation, engagement with different stakeholders, and their attitudes towards the responsiveness of their organization at large.