Abstract Over the past century, previously underrepresented international actors have increasingly enjoyed greater access to power, based partly on growing normative commitments to democratisation and egalitarianism. That these norms can take root even in an anarchic international system shows not only how deep these commitments have become but also provides a hard test for where their limits might be. Though previous literature has investigated drivers of increased participation in international organisations, comparatively little attention has been paid to its potential effects on other sources of global governance legitimacy. We root our investigation of the potential trade-off between the participation in and efficiency of the policy-making process on recent literature, which conceptualises each as important sources of international organisations’ perceived legitimacy. We argue that while increasing participation is associated with decreasing efficiency, it is conversely associated with increasing efficiency if it can encourage new coalition building. Empirically, we find support for these trade-offs using an original dataset we created documenting the Codex Alimentarius’s policy-making process for food safety standards (the default reference the World Trade Organization uses to settle relevant trade disputes). In total, we analyse more than 500 standards developed in almost 900 standard-setting meetings documented between 1963 and 2019.
Cheng et al. (Wed,) studied this question.