Undermining liberal international organizations from within: Evidence from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe

Jana Lipps () and Marc S. Jacob ()
Additional contact information
Jana Lipps: Center for Comparative and International Studies
Marc S. Jacob: University of Notre Dame

The Review of International Organizations, 2025, vol. 20, issue 2, No 5, 357-383

Abstract: Abstract International organizations promoting democratic governance and human rights are increasingly challenged by some of their own member states. To better understand this dynamic, we propose a distinction between the illiberal ideology of political parties and their regime environment, aiming to examine the international behavior of actors extending beyond autocratic governments. We argue that the domestic regime environment plays a pivotal role in influencing the extent to which illiberal parties engage in contestation to undermine liberal norms on the international stage. We expect contestation behavior to be primarily driven by illiberal parties seeking to diminish the influence of liberal international politics on domestic power structures. Moreover, we contend that government participation moderates illiberal parties’ contestation behavior. To test our expectations empirically, we study roll call votes in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), one of the most powerful international parliaments promoting liberal values. Drawing on an original dataset that records approximately 500,000 individual votes cast in PACE decisions, we find evidence for substantive contestation by illiberal parties, especially those representing illiberal regimes. Only illiberal governments in liberal systems moderate themselves at the amendment stage. Our study has implications for the potential threat that emerging illiberal actors pose to international liberal institutions.

Keywords: Liberal international order; Illiberalism; International parliamentary institutions; Voting; Democracy; Council of Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F53 K38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11558-024-09559-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:revint:v:20:y:2025:i:2:d:10.1007_s11558-024-09559-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... iology/journal/11558

DOI: 10.1007/s11558-024-09559-y

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of International Organizations is currently edited by A. Dreher

More articles in The Review of International Organizations from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().