International authority, legitimacy concerns and the impact on IO resources.

The scope and influence of the authority of international organisations has expanded, and there is an increasing tension between the need for common global action and solutions to deal with transnational issues and the type of policies promoted, as global governance institutions are often seen to promote liberal social and economic policies, contributing to a populist backlash against deepening global governance in post-industrial democracies. Concerns over the policies promoted through established global governance institutions is not limited to this populist backlash in post-industrial democracies but also in the global south, with new initiatives towards global governance by creating new institutions. This paper aims to examine whether concerns over the policy content promoted by IOs and their legitimacy impact the available resources of IOs. It aims to test whether the politicisation of concerns or the backlash over global governance institutions leads to important negative impacts such as reduction of resources allocated to these organisations. Although these are less pronounced and visible implications of the politicisation of the backslash than withdrawing membership it can have important implications for the functioning of the organisations and lead to further backlash in terms of their output legitimacy as they would be unable to fulfil their remit. This could result in diminished effectiveness of the IOs, lower levels of responsiveness to demands by member states and citizens, and could limit policy innovation and problem solving on transnational issues. This impact on the resources of IOs due to the politicisation of legitimacy concerns is expected to vary over time and across IOs with some IOs more affected than others depending on the severity of backlash against their activities. The argument is tested using new datasets on international authority and IOs resources which are combined with data on the politicisation of the backlash against IOS deriving from party manifestos at national elections.