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Supplemental material, sj-pdf-2-ejt-10.1177_13540661221123026 for Do international parliaments matter? An empirical analysis of influences on foreign policy and civil rights by Mathias Koenig-Archibugi and Luka Bareis in European Journal of International Relations

The attention of practitioners and scholars of private regulation of working conditions is focused on whether and how corporate buyers can help improve labor and safety standards in the factories that supply them by adopting codes of conduct, joining social certification schemes, participating in social audit processes, and financing safety improvements. In this Note, I argue that more attention should be paid to the possibility that private regulation schemes – whatever degree of compliance they achieve - mostly result in a displacement effect or sorting dynamic that leaves overall level of working conditions unchanged. The Note sketches a research agenda aimed at identifying the conditions under which a sorting dynamic can occur and at conceiving innovative private governance designs that could avoid it.

Some scholars and policy makers argue in favour of increasing democratic contestation for leadership and policy at the European level, for instance by having European-wide parties campaign for competing candidates for President of the European Commission ahead of European Parliament elections. But do such changes put the survival of the European Union at risk? According to the consociational interpretation of the EU, the near absence of competitive and majoritarian elements has been a necessary condition for the stability of the EU political system given its highly diverse population. This article contributes to the debate in two ways. First, it develops a more precise understanding of ‘problematic’ diversity by examining how three variables – the heterogeneity, polarisation and crosscuttingness of citizen preferences over public polices – affect the risk of democratic contestation generating persistent and systematically dissatisfied minorities. Second, it uses opinion surveys to determine whether the degree of diversity of the European population is problematically high compared to that of established democratic states. It is found that the population of the EU is slightly more heterogeneous and polarised than the population of the average Member State, although policy preferences in several Member States are more heterogeneous and polarised than the EU as a whole. Strikingly, however, policy preference cleavages are more crosscutting in the EU than in nearly all Member States, reducing the risk of persistent minorities. Moreover, policy preferences tend to be less heterogeneous and polarised, and nearly as crosscutting, in the EU as a whole as in the United States. For observers worried about how high polarisation and low crosscuttingness in policy preferences may combine to threaten democratic stability, these findings should be reassuring.

Transnational non-state governance arrangements (NGAs) are increasingly common in areas such as labor standards and environmental sustainability, often presenting themselves as innovative means through which the lives of marginalized communities in developing countries can be improved. Yet in some cases, the policy interventions adopted by the managers of these NGAs appear not to be welcomed by their supposed beneficiaries. This article accounts for this predicament by examining the effects of different configurations of accountability within NGAs promoting labor rights. Most labor-rights NGAs incorporate “proxy accountability” arrangements, in which consumers and activists hold decision makers accountable “on behalf” of the putative beneficiaries of the NGAs: workers and affected communities in poorer countries. The article shows how and why different combinations of proxy versus beneficiary accountability influence the choice of policy instruments used by NGAs, and applies the argument to three prominent non-state initiatives in the domain of labor standards.

Beyond wide agreement that many areas of contemporary policy making are unintelligible if processes that transcend the boundaries of individual states are not taken into account, analysts often disagree on how various 'global' and 'local' factors interact to produce policies and policy outcomes. The disagreement stems in part from the use of different analytic lenses, and specifically from the choice between 'state-centric' and 'polycentric' lenses. This article examines the fundamental assumptions of these general perspectives with regard to the polity, politics and policy dimensions of global policy making, and surveys some of the research questions and findings that resulted from their use. It concludes that scholars and policy makers should treat the two analytical lenses as complementary, as each of them stimulates the analyst to ask questions and look for entities and causal connections that the other lens may miss.