Authoritarian States and the Architecture of Global Governance

Abstract

How do authoritarian states engage with international institutions and legal norms? While international law and intergovernmental organizations are often associated with liberal democracies, authoritarian regimes increasingly participate in, construct, and invoke them. The purpose of this research is to examine how and why authoritarian states shape international law and organizations, and whether such engagement alters the perceived legitimacy of international rules. The central claim of this dissertation is that international institutions are not inherently liberal. I argue that two interlocking pillars of global governance, namely, law and organization, can be shaped differently by regime type of states. Authoritarian states do not simply resist international law, they strategically engage with it. They cluster institutionally, reinterpret foundational legal principles, and invoke legal authority to legitimate contentious policies. By examining these dynamics across legal discourse, and public reception, this project develops a unified framework for understanding authoritarian international cooperation. The first chapter, ``Varieties of Intergovernmental Organization: Measuring Member-State Distributions,'' develops a new measurement framework to capture the regime composition of IGOs. Using a Bayesian approach to model the distribution of member-state regime types, I show that IGOs exhibit systematic variation in their degree of authoritarian skew rather than central tendency. Organizations skewed towards authoritarian regimes display distinct political characteristics, suggesting that regime composition has meaningful consequences for how international cooperation is structured and maintained. The second chapter, ``The Domestic Sources of International Legal Rhetoric: Contesting Sovereignty Across Regimes,'' examines how governments interpret the principle of sovereignty in United Nations General Debate speeches. Using text-as-data methods, including word embeddings and semantic similarity analysis, I demonstrate that authoritarian regimes invoke sovereignty more frequently and associate it more closely with non-interference and territorial control. These findings indicate that international legal principles are not fixed in meaning but are strategically reinterpreted in ways that reflect domestic political incentives. The third chapter, ``Content or Cue? Conditional Messenger Effects in the Legitimacy of International Law,'' investigates whether the source of legal claims shapes public perceptions of legitimacy. Drawing on factorial survey experiments conducted in the Philippines and Australia, I find that citizens continue to view international law as legitimate even when it is endorsed solely by authoritarian states. While message effects condition responses at the margins, the results suggest that legal authority is not fully undermined by its association with authoritarian actors.