Non-state actors have increasingly participated in the policy-making of international organisations (IOs) via various channels, such as consultation procedures or formal arrangements for accreditation and participation. This paper explores whether such participation influences the policy-making of IOs and what factors determine the nature of this influence. More specifically, it addresses the following research question: Where, how, and why does formal access for transnational actors to international organizations shape the non-state actors’ capacity to influence the political outcomes of international policy-making? Most of the international relations literature on the role of non-state actors in world politics engages in the study of the legitimacy of different kinds of non-state actors and their accountability in using their influence. Until now, very little comparative research on the effects of interest groups on policy-making processes in IOs has been conducted. This paper aims to disentangle those effects empirically. By drawing on theories of domestic interest group politics and international relations, this paper aims to explain the supposed links between different aspects of formal access to IOs and non-state actor influence. These issues are examined with a series of descriptive and explanatory analyses on the basis of new survey data, collected within the scope of the ongoing research project “The Design of International Institutions: Legitimacy, Effectiveness, and Distribution in Global Governance” based at Stockholm University. More specifically, the survey will be used to examine the relationships between three different types of factors and non-state actor influence. These factors include: (1) institutional characteristics of international organisations, (2) issue-specific features and (3) non-state actors’ characteristics.
