Out and Down: The Reputational Damage of Exiting International Organizations
hosted by Professor
Nina Hall
Inken von Borzyskowski
St Catherine’s College, Oxford University
Out and Down: The Reputational Damage of Exiting International Organizations (co-authored with Felicity Vabulas)
Do states suffer reputational consequences when they exit international organizations (IOs)? And do the effects depend on whether states exit through voluntary withdrawal versus forced suspension? We argue that states likely face negative reputational consequences for both types of IO exit. IOs operate as hand-tying, credible commitment devices, and reneging on international agreements signals that the state may be more likely to back out of other international commitments. Exit stigmatizes the state as being a less credible partner, and actors in the international communityare thus likely to downgrade an exiting state's reputation. We also expect that suspension may generate stronger reputational damage than withdrawal because suspension indicates punishment by a peer group for misbehavior whereas withdrawal is not usually a rule violation, is self-selected, and managed. We test these expectations of exit effects on market analysts, using novel data on all exits across 198 states and 534 IOs between 1984 and 2022. Results indicate that both withdrawal and suspension are associated with reputational damage as measured by market analysts' perceptions of the state's political risk, though suspension generates more reputational damage than withdrawal. This shows that IOs can enable decentralized enforcement mechanisms and can help hold states accountable for reneging on international commitments, even if international relations lack a centralized enforcement mechanism.
INKEN VON BORZYSKOWSKI Inken von Borzyskowski is Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations, and Fellow at St Catherine's College. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014. Before joining Oxford, she spent four years at University College London, four years at Florida State University, a post-doc year at Free University Berlin, and an exchange year at Duke University. She has been a visiting researcher at Georgetown University, the European University Institute, University of Gothenburg, several Berlin-based institutions (Hertie School, Humboldt University, and the Social Science Research Center/WZB), and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in Washington DC.
Her research focuses on the domestic politics of international relations with an emphasis on international organisations and their effect on domestic conflict and elections. Specifically, her research falls into three areas: international democracy assistance; election violence; and international organisations' membership politics (withdrawals and suspensions). In her first book, she develops and tests a theory of how international organisations can influence election violence by changing election credibility. In her second book (under contract with the Cambridge University Press), she examines state exit from international organisations.
Her research is published or forthcoming in
British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Review of International Organisations, and
Cornell University Press. Her work has been supported by the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the US Institute of Peace, the World Bank, and the Swedish government's Folke Bernadotte Academy. Her research has been recognised with the APSA Best Article Award of the International Collaboration section, the ISA & USIP Peace Dissertation Prize, and the ECPR Best Paper Prize of the Comparative Political Institutions section.
She serves on the editorial boards of
International Studies Quarterly and Global Governance, on the Board of Directors at ACUNS (the Academic Council on the United Nations), and on several committees at APSA and ISA.
