Christopher O'Keefe

with Daniel Nielson and Michael Tierney: IOs as Norms Platforms: The World Bank's Influence on the Islamic Development Bank. In this paper we explore the proposition that changes in international organization (IO) behavior might derive from the IO’s interactions with other IOs. To test alternative mechanisms, we examine changes in lending behavior toward environmental protection at the Islamic Development Bank. Norm diffusion across IOs may take place via socialization by the norm entrepreneur - which, in early stages, may rely on material incentives or may occur as the norm adopter emulates the norm initiator. We also pay attention to non-IO sources of norms: member states and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The Islamic Development Bank (ISDB) provides an ideal setting to evaluate our hypothesis: the originators of most global norms, the advanced industrial democracies, do not have voting shares on the Islamic bank’s executive board. This allows us to focus on the effects of global norms diffused by IOs where the industrial democracies are the most powerful members from the effects of the preferences of IO’s member states, who jointly form the collective principal of the ISDB. We test related hypotheses on a dataset of more than 1085 ISDB loans from 1980 to 2000. We find evidence for socialization via common membership on the IMF-World Bank Development Committee and ISDB emulation of the World Bank.

with A. Bradley Potter:Collective Delegation and World Bank Aid Allocation. Most studies of multilateral foreign aid allocation assume that only the United States, or, in the case of regional institutions where the US has no role, some regional great power has de facto control over the institution. Although it may well be the case, it has seldom been tested against the alternative: the institutionalized governance structures matter in a way that allow the preferences of multiple states to matter. As most multilateral aid allocation decisions occur as a matter of collective delegation, we correct this misspecification by exploring how the distribution of votes—both in raw form and in a priori power indexes—affects aid allocation. We use a non-equivalent dependent variables design with pattern-matching and non-equivalent groups to test how variance in the distribution of votes across the multilateral development banks influences several dimensions of foreign aid.

Foreign Aid as Globalization: Does the Road to Aid Parallel Trade? Studies of foreign aid have followed work in international political economy that explore and test the microfoundations of common political economy models. Nevertheless, they remain focused on determinants of aid in the “traditional” donors: members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC). Non-DAC donors and potential donors (that is, the states that do not give aid) are frequently ignored. I argue that a Stolper-Samuelson model of relative endowments of skilled and unskilled labor determine preferences for aid, just as they do for trade. Aid can alter factor endowments and their productivity in the recipient country. These changes, in turn, affect the returns to factors in potential donor countries and thus influence preferences among citizens. I test this approach using the 1995 World Values Survey. I contribute to the literature on individual preferences for aid by testing this argument without respect to a country’s donor status: both DAC, non-DAC, and non-donor countries are included in this sample. I then discuss “next steps” to connect individual levelaid research to macro-level data.