Expertise, Ideology, and Distributive Politics

This chapter extends the framework outlined in the previous chapter to examine the most common arguments for delegation to international institutions: information. It distinguishes two rationales: delegation to acquire expertise that states do not individually have and delegation to share expertise and achieve common interpretations of expertise. While the literature emphasizes the former, the latter type of delegation is likely much more common. Moreover, it can be understood only in the context of ideological conflict between states when states have incentives not to share information truthfully. The chapter then looks at the conditions under which transnational and international actors can exploit such ideological conflict to gain influence.