Chapter 1 introduces the book’s central puzzle: why some electoral management bodies earn public trust and develop real autonomy while others remain vulnerable to manipulation. It argues that formal institutional design alone cannot explain cross-national variation. Instead, de facto autonomy emerges through political negotiation, transparency, accountability practices, and structured partisan engagement. Drawing on fieldwork, elite interviews, and archival research across Latin America and Africa, the chapter outlines a new theoretical framework centered on partisan inclusion within administrative processes that can foster legitimacy, reduce uncertainty, and strengthen electoral integrity. The chapter also introduces the book’s cross-regional comparative strategy, explains case selection, and previews how the empirical chapters illustrate the mechanisms through which party consultation, institutional sequencing, and administrative practices jointly shape election quality. The chapter positions the book within broader debates on democratic resilience, institutional trust, and the conditions under which electoral authorities acquire real independence.

Chapter 5 analyzes Ghana’s Electoral Commission (EC) across the country’s four republics, exploring how political competition, constitutional reforms, and patterns of informal partisan inclusion shaped the EC’s reputation as one of Africa’s most respected electoral management bodies. The chapter traces the evolution of party representation in electoral administration, showing how informal consultative forums, inter-party committees, and transparency mechanisms strengthened legitimacy and helped resolve disputes. It examines key moments, such as electoral transitions, administrative expansions, and conflict-laden reforms, that tested the EC’s autonomy. Using interviews and historical documents, the chapter highlights how Ghana’s consociational tendencies and stable political settlement contributed to robust election management, while also identifying vulnerabilities related to appointment powers and regional representation. The chapter situates Ghana as an example of how inclusion and administrative practice interact to produce durable de facto autonomy.

This chapter introduces the two contributions that constitute Part V, “Economics and institutional design”.

Arms control agreements present a dual puzzle: states often fail to reach them despite potential mutual benefits, and when agreements do emerge, they vary dramatically in their monitoring provisions – from basic self-reporting to intensive on-site inspections. Approximately 225 multilateral and bilateral agreements have sought to limit military capabilities or behaviors between states. This chapter introduces these empirical patterns and situates them within broader debates in international relations. While political scientists typically associate uncertainty with conflict and instability, this book argues that uncertainty – particularly from domestic political changes – can create opportunities for formal cooperation. The analysis focuses on monitoring provisions as a critical design feature that allows states to detect violations while potentially creating new security vulnerabilities through information exposure. Drawing on both institutionalist and security studies approaches, the book examines how states manage these trade-offs differently under varying conditions. The chapter previews the book’s key contributions: a new theoretical framework linking domestic political volatility to agreement design, comprehensive data on historical arms control agreements, and detailed case studies based on archival materials. This approach offers fresh insights for both scholars studying international cooperation and practitioners confronting contemporary security challenges.

Chapter 3 explains why the ICC makes the US so worried. The overarching fear is that the ICC might initiate politically biased investigations and prosecutions that target American troops scattered across the globe. This fear is the result of the US losing two key negotiating battles over the Court’s institutional design at the Rome Conference, the 1998 diplomatic gathering that established the ICC. The first is that the ICC has jurisdiction over all individuals – including those from states that, like the US, never joined the Court – when they are on the territory of an ICC member. The other is that the ICC has an independent prosecutor who can select his or her own situations to investigate without needing the permission of states or the UN Security Council. The combination of these two factors alarmed Clinton administration officials. Given America’s global military presence, its troops would be uniquely exposed to the ICC’s jurisdiction and might face an ICC prosecutor who was free to inject anti-American biases into the Court’s work. From the US perspective, the Rome Conference spawned to a new threat to America’s global military.

This chapter asks whether international courts are designed with institutional safeguards to preserve independence. It conceptualizes formal independence as the formal rules that aim to safeguard autonomous judicial decision-making. This elsewhere is referred to as de jure independence. The chapter presents an original measure of formal independence and estimates the formal independence of twenty-six ICs that have operated between 1945 and 2015. The chapter compares formal independence across these ICs and reveals significant variation in formal independence. It shows that rules pertaining to the selection and tenure of international judges as well as the managerial autonomy of ICs are the sources of most of the observed variation.

The institutional design of NJMs varies considerably in the manner they enable, empower or constrain worker and community struggles. Whereas the UNGPs effectiveness criteria, along with other key contributions to the NJM design literature, emphasise the importance of procedural fairness, across the cases we studied purely procedural efforts were insufficient to address the deep imbalances of power between business actors and aggrieved communities. However, in some cases, these imbalances were ameliorated by aspects of institutional design that the UNGPs effectiveness criteria leave implicit: the financial and human resources the NJM can mobilise, the authority it can command and the extent to which its design enhances its capacity to exercise leverage in support of human rights redress. Even where the NJM’s design provides leverage, NJM staff frequently hesitate to flex institutional muscle for fear of jeopardising crucial resources and relationships. As such, the usefulness of transnational NJMs’ interventions often depends crucially also on factors beyond institutional design, namely the extent to which aggrieved communities are able to draw on and effectively deploy other forms of leverage and influence.

When NJMs fail to deliver remedy, criticism is often first levelled against their institutional design: the policies, processes and powers that characterise their operations. Chapter 2 interrogates literatures that conceptualise and critique effective design, primarily theories of non-judicial governance and regulation within the business and human rights scholarship focused on NJMs and approaches captured under the term ‘new governance’. Four elements of institutional design receive particular emphasis in these literatures: efforts to establish accessible and fair non-judicial procedures, processes that support socialisation and learning, strong institutional capacity and resourcing and provisions to help motivate businesses to engage with non-judicial redress processes. This scholarship, though, often overlooks important areas of ambiguity, firstly, whether and how design can encompass and respond to the divergent purposes and aims that animate grievance claims and, secondly, implications for institutional design that arise from recognising the embedding of regulatory and redress processes in broader, and highly unequal, social relations.

Some propose that states tie hands by signing alliance treaties. The presence of an alliance treaty increases the audience costs of violating a commitment to defend another state, having the effect of tying hands. This chapter argues that states prefer to keep their hands untied to make it easier to avoid getting drawn into the wrong wars. Accordingly, when states design alliance treaties, they routinely include flexibility language in the treaties that enable them to stay out of conflicts involving embattled allies without violating the treaty, thereby reducing or avoiding the audience costs of abandoning an ally. The chapter demonstrates that all alliances since 1945 include such flexibility language, including alliances signed by the US and Soviet Union/Russia. Further, the chapter demonstrates that in every single post-1945 case when a state allegedly abandoned an embattled ally, the flexibility language of the treaty means that the decision to stay out of the conflict did not technically violate the treaty. On the rare occasions when states want to tie hands more tightly to bolster deterrence, they make verbal statements that de facto reduce the flexibility of the alliance treaty, though such verbal statements are crafted to tie hands minimally.