The past decade has seen a sustained move by students of international institutions and organizations to viewing their subject matter as independent variables affecting state interests and policy. Conceptually, this has put a premium on identifying the mechanisms connecting institutions to...

In this article I discuss output legitimacy as a category of normative analysis of international organizations (IOs). I first take issue with the widespread view that output legitimacy is just a synonym for organizational effectiveness or efficiency, and unrelated to democracy. Against this...

In this paper, the implicit and explicit conceptualizations of international organizations found in the three major theories of international relations are outlined and compared. It turns out that in a neorealist framework, international organizations can be explained; however, they exhibit no...