International Bureaucracies as Runaway Agents? How Organizational Structure Affects Agency Slack
Final Report Abstract
The extensive delegation of power to international organizations (IOs) has been accompanied by occasional agency slack. While prior studies suggest that IOs’ propensity for agency slack may be rooted in their organizational characteristics, this has rarely been explored empirically. To address this research gap, this project offers a conceptualization and operationalization of agency slack. We measure agency slack based on the observable actions of the principal, who can either expend additional resources to control agents or sanction undesired behavior. In a second step, we develop a framework to study the relationship between organizational structure and patterns of agency slack. Drawing on original data gathered on 16 JIO member organizations, we conduct a fuzzy-set analysis to assess the empirical resonance of organizational configurations. Our results show that the observed cases can be placed on two paths towards agency slack. Both paths contain staffing rules in favor of the agent. Once these combine with wide access to third-parties or permeability (Path 1), and once they appear together with extensive delegation of authority and a vague mandate (Path 2). Both paths show that the presence (rather than the absence) of certain organizational configurations is associated with the occurrence of agency slack, which confirms our theoretical expectations. The findings also resonate with prior studies that examined agency losses at individual IOs. One of the striking findings of our study concerns staffing rules, or the control over staff by either agents or principals. Staffing rules in favor of the agent appear to be an (almost) necessary condition for agency slack. Indeed, with one exception (FAO), we find that, in all cases where staffing rules favor the agent, we also observe agency slack (in combination with other conditions). Furthermore, we find that, except for UNODC, all cases where we identified signs of agency slack involved the agent having control over staff. We cannot draw similarly clear conclusions for the other conditions, as we find both cases of agency slack and its absence in different combinations involving varying degrees of delegation of authority or permeability. Overall, however, the evidence broadly supports our original expectations, in the sense that agency slack is associated with staffing rules that favor the agent, either in combination with extensive access to third parties (high permeability) or when combined with wide-ranging delegation of authority, and a vague organizational mandate that the agent has to adhere to. Prospective studies could use these findings to explore other groups of IOs (beyond the UN system) comparatively, or to examine the causal mechanisms of agency slack in individual cases via process tracing or similar methods. One particularly fruitful avenue for further inquiry would be a closer examination of personnel decisions and contracting at IOs and how these impact upon the organization’s mandate execution.
