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PONARS Eurasia
PONARS Eurasia
  • About
    • Contact
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RECOMMENDED
  • In the Caucasus, There Is a Peace Agreement but Not Peace

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RSS PONARS Eurasia Podcast
  • How is the Russian Government Coping with Rising Food Prices? [Lipman Series 2021] March 15, 2021
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  • Russian Lawmakers Adjust National Legislation to the Revised Constitutional Framework [Lipman Series 2020] October 26, 2020
    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Ben Noble and Nikolay Petrov about ongoing changes to Russia’s national legislation based on the recently revised constitutional framework, and what these changes portend for the 2021 Duma election.
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    In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Graeme Robertson and Konstantin Gaaze about Russia’s September 13 regional elections and whether or not the Kremlin should be worried about upcoming Duma elections.
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    In this week's PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Natalya Chernyshova (University of Winchester) and Nikolay Petrov (Chatham House) about the ongoing protests in Belarus, and what they mean for the future of the current regime.
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Controlling Institutions: International Organizations and the Global Economy (book event)

  • March 27, 2011
  • Randall Stone

 

PONARS Eurasia member Randall W. Stone discussed his new book "Controlling Institutions: International Organizations and the Global Economy," (Cambridge University Press, March 2011), at the George Washington University. Alex Mourmouras, chief of the European Division at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Institute provided commentary. Randall Stone’s book was motivated by a series of questions regarding the operation of the IMF. How does the organization’s decisionmaking processes actually work? How important is the role of the United States? Is U.S. power more formal or informal?

Stone’s main observation is that while the U.S. has 17 percent of the vote in the IMF, it "runs the show." This discovery, perhaps not in itself surprising, leads Stone down a further avenue of inquiry: What are the informal governing procedures of the IMF? How and when do informal procedures trump the formal rules of international organizations (IOs)? How do formal and informal governance interact within IOs?

Stone sets out to compare formal and informal decision-making procedures in the IMF. The formal procedures of the IMF involve initiation of discussion by the IMF managing director via proposal power, weighted voting allotted among member states, and universal representation. Only the managing director has proposal power, and no one state has a proportion of votes great enough to singlehandedly hijack the decision making process. The informal procedure operates in some significantly different ways. While formal procedures stress the equality of representation (not just voting weights), informal procedures often involve U.S. intervention prior to the executive board meeting and the managing director's proposal, and an assertion of agenda control. Once proposals reach the executive board meeting, most states in opposition abstain rather than vote against the U.S. position. Stone asserts that a "norm of deference" is clear in this informal procedure. Furthermore, even outside the U.S., those states with higher levels of participation determine influence, rather than those that might be expected to be more influential. As an example of this, he pointed to Belgium having a higher level of clout than China. Stone also argues that informal procedures mitigate the problems of the IMF’s executive directorate. First, thanks to universal representation, the executive board has too many divergent interests for progress to occur on significant issues. U.S. intervention and assertion of agenda control streamlines the process and serves as a means of interest aggregation. Furthermore, with around 100 different representatives in the meeting room, little confidentiality is available for negotiations. Most of these representatives have not been delegated with decision-making responsibilities by their respective governments, so decisions are stalled further. In these ways, Stone argues that the executive board is deliberately ineffective.  Beyond the IMF, Stone analyzes the WTO and the EU as comparative cases. He argues that similar characteristics (formalized dispute resolution, informal rule making procedures, and minimal or uneven delegation of executive authority) allow for comparison of these organizations. Stone concludes that by looking at formal and informal decision and rule making procedures, institutional design and intentional inefficacy of formalized processes, and the ways in which "important states" capture institutions without hampering legitimacy, scholars of international organizations can understand how these organizations function.

 

Randall Stone
Randall Stone
Website | + posts
Professor, Director of the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies, Director of the Peter D. Watson Center for Conflict and Cooperation, Department of Political Science

Affiliation

University of Rochester

Links

University of Rochester (Bio)

Expertise

International Trade, Economics, Institutions
  • Randall Stone
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The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing Dissent in post-Communist Russia (book event)

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Russia’s Conflicts on Libya

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