Scholars often conflate the concepts of pooling (how states make collective decisions) and delegation (authorizing an international body to act) in examining the authority of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). We clarify the difference by showing how states “soft pool” decision-making through informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) without creating legal obligations or delegating authority. IIGOs such as the G-groups are growing in prevalence and importance because soft pooling allows states to make collective decisions that are politically binding in nonlegal ways. We examine organizational characteristics of IIGOs that allow states to minimize sovereignty costs while cooperating through soft pooling – including the use of consensus to express shared expectations through declarations and memoranda of understanding and administrative structures such as rotating chairs to avoid delegating to an independent secretariat. We review these understudied organizational alternatives, explaining how soft pooling makes IIGOs authoritative even as states retain sovereignty.

This chapter outlines a possible explanation for the overall stability of the Israeli regime based on the concept of state capacity, namely, the ability of the state to use coercive and administrative capabilities to “get things done.” It therefore emphasizes the role of the state itself in explaining the regime. The first section provides a short conceptual clarification of the concept of state capacity and its relationship with regime stability. This is followed by a presentation of the historical origins of Israeli state capacity and some measures of its capacity. The main part of this chapter discusses the ways in which state capacity sustains the regime’s stability in light of three challenges: the internal aspect of the conflict, the challenge to state authority from political tensions among its Jewish citizens, and the ways in which the zones of control have shifted according to the limited ability of state capacity to ensure direct control of the entire Occupied Territories.