Vaubel: A Public Choice Approach to International Organization

Vaubel, R. 1986. A public choice approach to international organization. Public Choice 51, no. 1: 39-57.

"Traditional" approaches to understanding the impact of international organizations rely on the following, according to the author: without IOs, international externalities would not be controlled, international economies of scale would not be exploited and typically a game theory assumption is used to show that something is needed to reduced the negative possibility of prisoners' dilemma. "These arguments are logically impeccable but misleading incomplete and often misapplied" (40).

Why these are lacking is explained.

All international organizations are staffed by bureaucrats who are interested in pursuing their own policies.

"The purpose of this paper has been to develop a positive theory of international organization which can supplement the conventional normative theory used as a positive theory" (52).


"It does not imply that international organization is generally undesirable. But it can be used to emphasize the advantages of decentralized policy making and to warn against a naive internationalism which welcomes international agreements for their own sake...International organization can be and is abused, and the cause is not any occasional lack of virtue among politics but a systematic built-in tendency towards collusion at the expense of the citizens" (53).