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We examine how analogy-based collective decision-making of member states contributes to the endogenous emergence of informal rules and the incremental change of international organizations (IOs). Decision-making by analogy is an important characteristic of day-to-day decision-making in IOs. Relating current decisions to previous ones through analogies drives incremental change and simultaneously reinforces organizational resilience. Whereas the foreign policy analysis literature shows that analogies can be used as cognitive shortcuts in fuzzy and complex foreign policy situations, we focus on their use to overcome social ambiguity (indeterminacy) of coordination situations in IOs. Drawing on psychological conceptions, we develop two micro-level mechanisms that elucidate the effects of analogy-based collective decision-making in member-driven IOs. Analogy-based collective decisions emphasizing similarity between a current situation and previous ones follow an established problem schema and produce expansive and increasingly well-established informal rules. Collective decisions that are analogy-based but emphasize a crucial difference follow different problem schemas and trigger the emergence of additional informal rules that apply to new classes of cases. The result is an increasingly fine-grained web of distinct organizational solutions for a growing number of problems. Accordingly, an IO can increasingly facilitate collective decision-making and gains resilience. Empirically, we probe these propositions with a documentary analysis of decision-making in the Yugoslavia sanctions committee, established by the United Nations Security Council to deal with a stream of requests for exempting certain goods or services from the comprehensive economic embargo imposed on Yugoslavia in response to the War in the Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In International Relations applications, theorists employing Principal-Agent (P-A) theory have posited that the fact of delegation defines a relationship between states (collective Principals) and international organizations (Agents) where recontracting threats are the predominant way states influence IOs. Developing a category of delegation to international Trustees, I argue that recontracting tools will be both harder to use and less effective at influencing the Trustees. Trustees are (1) selected because of their personal reputation or professional norms, (2) given independent authority to make decisions according to their best judgment or professional criteria, and (3) empowered to act on behalf of a beneficiary. These three factors account for the different politics between Principals and Trustees, a politics aimed at either keeping issues outside of the domain of the Trustee or at rhetorically engaging the Trustee's authority in an effort to persuade the common 'beneficiary' whose loyalty and respect both States and the Trustee seek. In explaining why recontracting threats are not central to Principal-Trustee relations, the analysis bounds the realm in which we might expect P-A theory to apply, and provides a theoretical basis to question the 'rational expectations' claim that ICs are tailoring their decisions to reflect the wishes of powerful states and avoid adverse recontracting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]