Critical Ties: How Reliable Information Suppliers Influence International Organizations' Propensity to Criticize States

This talk explores the role of reliable information suppliers in shaping the decisions of international organizations (IOs) to publicly criticize states' actions. Focusing on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), Dr. Pauselli examines how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with established ties to the Commission provide crucial information that influences IACHR's critical pronouncements. He proposes that IOs are more likely to issue public criticisms when they have access to information from NGOs that are not only knowledgeable but also deemed reliable through repeated interactions. Using an original dataset of press releases issued by the IACHR from 1996 to 2020, this study demonstrates that countries with a higher number of local NGOs participating in IACHR hearings are more likely to be subject to critical press releases. Furthermore, NGOs' expertise in particular human rights domains significantly correlates with targeted criticisms on those issues. These results highlight the importance of NGO-IO ties in the flow of reliable information and show the key role of trusted information suppliers in the international advocacy landscape. This study contributes to the understanding of how IOs navigate information asymmetries and emphasizes the strategic importance of reliable information in promoting states' accountability.

 Bio: Gino Pauselli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at UIUC, specializing in the intersection of human rights, global governance, and transnational advocacy. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University.