This chapter provides support for my main hypotheses that more urban and food-importing autocracies should be more likely to default, whereas more rural and food-exporting democracies should be more likely to renege on their international financial obligations.Drawing on approximately 50 years of cross-national data, I demonstrate robust evidence in favor of my main theoretical expectations, which remain even after introducing an extensive battery of controls for additional country- and systemic-level alternative explanations.In addition, I show that, for the subset of countries with relevant data on subsidy costs, it is precisely the most rural-biased democracies, and most urban-biased autocracies, that are most likely to default on their debt.

I begin this chapter with a case study of Costa Rica, a country almost universally admired for its peaceful and democratic political system.In such a consolidated democracy, I demonstrate that political attention to rural voters played a crucial role in the electoral success of the dominant PLN party; however, when faced with fiscal crisis in the 1980s, inability to reform agricultural pricing policies (as well as wage policies for electorally-crucial public sector unions) ultimately drove Costa Rica into default.The chapter concludes with discussion of contentious democratic politics in Jamaica, where political violence often organized by parties in urban centers unfortunately often plays a role.In such a system, the importance of limiting urban unrest through cheap food policies became a clear target under both PNP and JLP rule.Under severe fiscal crisis in the 1980s, Jamaican rulers proved unwilling to reform pricing policies beneficial to urban interests out of fear of societal unrest that would result, driving Jamaica to default not only to its external creditors, but also on its loans from the IMF itself.

Chapter 2 offers a novel conceptualization of administrative styles. Depending on dominant strategic orientations shaping administrative routines, we identify four ideal types to systematically assess IPAs’ policy influence: a servant style, an advocacy style, a consolidator style, and an entrepreneurial style. In addition to this conceptual innovation, we offer a theoretical framework accounting for the variation in administrative styles across different international bureaucracies. We argue that the variation in administrative styles across different organizations can be explained by two factors, namely the perceptions of internal and external challenges.

This chapter presents the main aims, research questions and key contributions. While a consensus seems to be emerging that bureaucracies of international organizations are of growing relevance for policy making beyond the nation-state, we still do not systematically understand if and how exactly international bureaucracies seek to influence policies. We show that, most importantly, there is a lack of concepts for a comparative assessment of bureaucratic influence across different international organizations.

The concluding chapter gives an overview of our key results and critically reassess our conceptual and theoretical approach in light of our empirical findings. We discuss theoretical implications and some limitations to our study and conclude by pointing out future avenues for research, including the need to investigate the link between administrative styles and policy outputs, the interaction of formal autonomy and administrative styles, as well as issues of stability and change of administrative styles.

This chapter focuses s on the IMF and the UNHCR as two IPAs that display a highly entrepreneurial administrative style. These IPAs share routines that combine strong policy advocacy with institutional consolidation. Taking account of the high differences in formal autonomy between the two IPAs, these similarities in administrative styles are striking. In particular, one might intuitively expect that in view of its limited autonomy the UNHCR should display a servant style. Yet, what these IPAs have in common is the perception of similarly low internal and high external constraints that facilities the emergence of entrepreneurial routines in both.

In this chapter, the comparison of the NATO and the ILO reveals similar administrative styles despite them having almost nothing in common in structural terms. While NATO’s servant style is not particularly astounding, given its policy area, mandate, and functional design, the ILO’s case is puzzling. Despite it being an organization with rather broad autonomy, (normative) authority, and high legitimacy, the ILO’s IPA regularly behaves very passively when it comes to putting its own stance on the IO’s outputs. We show that their similar servant styles can traced back high internal challenges and to the perception of not particularly pronounced external pressures. In conjunction, the constraints arising from the former and the sense of security stemming from the latter render more entrepreneurial behaviour neither possible nor necessary.

Chapter 5 compares the IOM and FAO. It highlights how internal challenges in the absence of serious external threats favour a similar consolidator style in the two IPAs. Both IPAs combine pronounced routines directed towards institutional consolidation with only weak policy advocacy. We show that neither size, budgets, mandate, nor organizational structure can convincingly account both for the IPAs’ pronounced positional orientation and their lack of functional orientation geared towards advocacy. Moreover, the chapter draws attention to the stickiness of administrative styles in showing that such deeply and institutionalized organizational routines tend to display high stability towards endogenous and exogenous change.

This chapter outlines how these conceptual and theoretical considerations can be studied empirically and offers a detailed overview of the operationalization of IPAs’ administrative styles. We suggest an operationalization of administrative styles that relies on nine indicators loosely corresponding to a shortened policy cycle model. Moreover, we present our empirical understanding of the key explanatory factors that can account for the variation in administrative styles across different organizations and reflect upon our interview–based methodological approach. By using a two–step case selection strategy, we are able to demonstrate that IPAs do indeed develop very different administrative styles, which formal and structural organizational features alone cannot account for. We conclude the chapter by reflecting on the rationale for case selection and by presenting a brief overview of the IPAs under study.