Erin R. Graham

What explains the design and development of funding rules at international organizations? I investigate this question in the context of the United Nations system, which has undergone a dramatic shift in financing. Long associated with mandatory contributions, the United Nations increasingly relies on voluntary resources earmarked by individual donors. Previous studies have investigated the financing puzzle from a behavioral perspective and have found that wealthy donors use voluntary funding to rein in costs and constrain international organization programs. Providing an alternative theoretical approach, I investigate the financing puzzle from an institutional design perspective. I provide original United Nations funding rule data to demonstrate that it is not only funding practices, but also underlying funding rules, that have changed over time. I theorize how states with favorable views of the United Nations that sought to expand its activities — rather than those that desired to constrain it — had incentives to introduce funding rules that offered more flexibility and control to donors. I test the argument with a longitudinal case study of funding rule design and change at United Nations economic development institutions. The article expands the institutional design literature by integrating funding rules as a consequential design component and provides a novel explanation for changes in United Nations financing.

International relations scholarship largely accepts that multilateralism lies at the heart of the liberal international order and is instantiated in formal, intergovernmental organizations. This paper revisits the conventional wisdom regarding the multilateral character of international organization (IO) governance by drawing attention to the funding methods used to finance contemporary IOs. I argue that different funding rules constitute different modes of governance. While mandatory funding rules are easily reconciled with traditional conceptions of multilateralism, voluntary rules are not. In particular, restricted voluntary funding rules devolve authority over funding decisions to individual actors, undercutting the collective decision making that is central to multilateral governance. I demonstrate the relevance of the argument in the case of the United Nations, which has transformed from an institution reliant primarily on mandatory contributions, to one disproportionately reliant on restricted, voluntary funds. The counterintuitive result is an increasingly bilateral United Nations. The paper contributes to our understanding of the relationship between multilateralism and IO governance, and has implications for literature related to institutional design, delegation, and development aid. In addition, it raises empirical and normative questions regarding reliance on voluntary funding.

What factors inhibit or facilitate cross-subfield conversations in political science? This article draws on diffusion scholarship to gain insight into cross-subfield communication. Diffusion scholarship represents a case where such communication might be expected, given that similar diffusion processes are analyzed in American politics, comparative politics, and international relations. We identify nearly 800 journal articles published on diffusion within political science between 1958 and 2008. Using network analysis we investigate the degree to which three “common culprits”—terminology, methodological approach, and journal type—influence levels of integration. We find the highest levels of integration among scholars using similar terms to describe diffusion processes, sharing a methodological approach (especially in quantitative scholarship), and publishing in a common set of subfield journals. These findings shed light on when cross-subfield communication is likely to occur with ease and when barriers may prove prohibitive.

Over the past fifty years, top political science journals have published hundreds of articles about policy diffusion. This article reports on network analyses of how the ideas and approaches in these articles have spread both within and across the subfields of American politics, comparative politics and international relations. Then, based on a survey of the literature, the who, what, when, where, how and why of policy diffusion are addressed in order to identify and assess some of the main contributions and omissions in current scholarship. It is argued that studies of diffusion would benefit from paying more attention to developments in other subfields and from taking a more systematic approach to tackling the questions of when and how policy diffusion takes place.