Endogenous Sources of Liberal Decline: How the Rise of Global Governance Invites Blame-Shifting to and Credit-Claiming from International Institutions

Particularly in those industrialized democracies that have benefitted most from the establishment of global governance institutions (GGIs), mobilization against liberal internationalism has intensified and become electorally successful in recent years. While extant explanations focus on the ‘losers’ of globalized governance, this paper asks why its traditional proponents – most notably incumbent national executives –do so little to publicly re-legitimize GGIs. We argue that the empowerment of GGIs has increased office-seeking executives’ opportunities to engage in blame-shifting and credit-claiming strategies. The delegation of governance functions to GGIs initially enables national executives to credibly blame them for failing policies. But more authoritative GGIs will also be associated with more effective problem-solving for which national executives can claim credit. We thus expect, counter-intuitively, that national executives’ blame-shifting and credit-claiming strategies will undermine the legitimacy of precisely those IOs to which they have delegated the largest amount of political authority. This dynamic should be amplified with the success of challenger parties and the complexity of respective global governance arrangements. We test these claims in national executives’ ritualized accountability speeches (such as the State of the Union address, e.g.). Existing text corpora cover various European, North and South American countries in the period of 1990-2016. We retrieve all references to selected GGIs in international trade (EU, WTO, and selected PTAs) to score the sentiment they express along dictionary-based methods. The GGI references should be systematically more negative than references to the domestic government. This difference in sentiment, furthermore, should vary with a GGI’s authority, the electoral strength of challenger parties, and the state’s embeddedness in the multilateral system. In sum, the proposed paper aims to show whether and to what extent GGI de-legitimation is driven by the inconsistency between the long-term benefits associated with GGIs and short-term political incentives in domestic political competition.