Representative Bureaucracy in the IMF and World Bank

• In Event: International Bureaucrats: Representation, Agency and Power in Global Governance

Abstract

In global governance, questions of fair and equitable representation have focused on member state voice and votes in executive boards and control over executive level positions such as President or General Secretary (Kahler 2001; Vestergaard and Wade 2013; Kaya 2015; Hall and Woods 2018). More recently, IO scholars have turned attention to questions of bureaucratic representation beneath the tip of the iceberg with attention to diversity with the ranks of management and staff (Parizek 2017; Trondel, Murdoch and Geys 2017; Badache 2020; Christensen 2020; Parizek and Stephen 2020). This shift in the level of analysis has been fueled by interest in extending more domestically-oriented studies from public administration on representative bureaucracies to international organizations and growing interest in how and under what conditions diversity and representation throughout IGOs shapes their perceived legitimacy (Tallberg, Backstrand and Aart Scholte 2018; McDowell et al 2020) and may well affect stakeholder’s trust and willingness to work or comply with IGOs, forum shop, or context multilateralism (Morse and Keohane 2013). In this paper, we contribute to this work in three ways. First, to add to the theoretical literature, we construct a working definition and set of hypotheses regarding expectations for representative bureaucracy befitting international organizations whose governance structures are based on weighted voting systems rather than one-state/one-vote rules such as the UN. Second, we construct an original dataset of bureaucratic representation in the IMF and World Bank from 2000-2020, filling an important empirical gap in publicly available information on diversity in gender, nationality and professional disciplines of staff across varying positions from top-level management to more street-level bureaucrats. Third, we use these data to map trends in representation over time for two purposes: (1) to see if the IMF and World Bank’s espoused commitment to diversification of staff and management through organizational reforms has in fact resulted in significant changes and (2) if such changes have occurred, how well they reflect an adjustment to shifts in the balance of power between member states or demands for change in the expertise of staff to shed old ideologies and bring in fresh policy perspectives (Parizek and Stephen 2020).

Authors

• Mirko Noa Heinzel

• Catherine Weaver, University of Texas, Austin