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Whether or not popular legitimacy matters for international organizations (IOs) is a topic of extensive assumption but little rigorous research. A key obstacle has been the methodological difficulties of establishing legitimacy’s effect using observational data. This article offers the first experimental study of the effects of popular legitimacy on IOs. Theoretically, we propose that popular legitimacy affects IOs through the mechanism of government responsiveness to public opinion. Empirically, we test this expectation by presenting elected politicians in Sweden with a scenario of proposed reforms to the World Health Organization (WHO) and randomized information about the organization’s degree of popular legitimacy. The results show that higher levels of popular legitimacy made politicians more willing to confer additional authority and resources on the IO. The effects were particularly large among politicians with positive pretreatment attitudes toward the WHO and leftist ideological orientations. These findings suggest that popular legitimacy matters by affecting national decision-makers’ willingness to empower IOs.

As the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow, policymakers are increasingly grappling with the question of how to regulate this technology. The most far-reaching international initiative is the European Union (EU) AI Act, which aims to establish the first comprehensive, binding framework for regulating AI. In this article, we offer the first systematic analysis of non-state actor preferences toward international regulation of AI, focusing on the case of the EU AI Act. Theoretically, we develop an argument about the regulatory preferences of business actors and other non-state actors under varying conditions of AI sector competitiveness. Empirically, we test these expectations using data from public consultations on European AI regulation. Our findings are threefold. First, all types of non-state actors express concerns about AI and support regulation in some form. Second, there are nonetheless significant differences across actor types, with business actors being less concerned about the downsides of AI and more in favor of lax regulation than other non-state actors. Third, these differences are more pronounced in countries with stronger commercial AI sectors. Our findings shed new light on non-state actor preferences toward AI regulation and point to challenges for policymakers balancing competing interests in society.

This article develops a novel approach for studying the influence of supranational institutions in international cooperation. While earlier research tends to treat member states as a collective yielding influence on supranational institutions, we unpack this collective to explore differentiated supranational influence. To this end, the article makes three contributions. First, it develops a method for measuring differentiated supranational influence that makes it possible to identify which member states give ground when a supranational institution is influential. Second, it theorizes the sources of differentiated supranational influence, arguing that states are more likely to accommodate a supranational institution when they are more dependent on the resources of this institution. Third, it illustrates the usefulness of this approach empirically through an analysis of the influence of the European Commission in European Union bargaining. The analysis suggests that our approach can measure and explain differentiated supranational influence under conditions of both heightened crisis and everyday politics.