Research Activities of International Organizations

International governmental organizations are no research institutions, except for rare cases such as CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and the European University Institute. This project deals with the questions why international organizations nevertheless invest in academic research, and how the extent they do differs between organizations. I argue that international organizations invest in research under the following circumstances: First, if organizations are mandated by their member countries to complete a specific, in particular technical task, they use research to be better able to fulfill their mandate. This applies in particular if they collect data, which they – and independent researchers from universities or other organizations – go on to analyze and interpret. Second, international organizations invest in research for organizational purposes. It allows them to grow as an organization and to attract qualified, academically educated staff. Third, contested international organizations invest in research to legitimize themselves. Research radiates ‘impartiality’ and ‘expertise’. However, even in the case that organizations heavily invest in research, they do not necessarily use the results to actually inform their operations. Research and operations follow two different, distinct logics. Literature on research activities of international organizations as such is scarce. Of these, the majority focuses on individual organizations such as the World Bank (Squire 2000, Mehta 2001, Lateef 2016), the International Monetary Fund (Clift and Tomlinson 2012, Kentikelenis et al. 2016), the European Union (Boswell 2008, Radaelli 1999), or the World Health Organization (Terry and Van der Rijt 2010). Some literature takes a comparative or overarching view (Zapp 2018, Zapp 2020, Littoz-Monnet 2017), but these contributions still usually centre on large UN organizations and thus cannot be generalized to small entities. My argument builds on literature on evidence-based policy-making (Davies and Nutley 2000, Sanderson 2002, Parkhurst 2017), organizational studies (Vaubel 2006, Ege 2016, Eckhard and Ege 2016), and legitimization (Tallberg et al. 2014, Ecker-Ehrhardt 2018, Dingwerth et al. 2020, Zürn et al. 2012, Zürn 2018). It is both informed by rational choice and institutionalist theories. For the empirical analysis, I take a quantitative and comparative approach: I analyze the research output and institutional structures of 73 international organizations, selected on basis of the ‘Measure of International Authority’ dataset (Hooghe and Marks 2015). I use regression analysis to find the factors determining the number of articles these 73 organization produce (collected from the Web of Science database). In a case study, I compare the thematic development of projects and research articles of the World Bank based on a lexicon of themes. Overall, I find that research activities of international organizations are highly skewed: The majority of organizations produces little or no research output, while some organizations have become active research producers. It seems that investment in research is less motivated by the actual research, but by strategic and organizational gains. Thus, this project contributes both to the literature on evidence-based policy-making as well as to research on international bureaucracies’ attempts to legitimize themselves.