How Many International Non-governmental Organizations Are There?

• In Event: Growth and Decay of International Institutions

Abstract

International non-governmental organizations (INGOs) are important actors in world politics. Scholars have sought to understand when INGOs are founded, under what conditions INGOs affect national and international politics and policy, and why and how INGOs themselves operate. An essential question for all of these research agendas is how many INGOs exist. That question is perhaps surprisingly difficult to answer. This study documents the extent of missingness in the Yearbook of International Organizations, which is the leading source of data on INGOs as well as other actors in contemporary global governance. Furthermore, it develops and tests hypotheses about the nature of this missingness. It finds that the {\em Yearbook} is more likely to include INGOs headquartered in wealthy and democratic countries as well as organizations that are integrated into the United Nations system. These findings point to important ways that political scientists' understanding of INGOs may be biased by reliance on data from the Yearbook. They also speak to ongoing debates about the under-representation of voices from the Global South in global governance and transnational advocacy; our findings suggest that INGOs headquartered in the Global North may be even more over-represented in positions of power than it would appear given that the main data source on INGOs itself over-represents such groups.

Authors

• Sarah S. Bush, University of Pennsylvania

• Jennifer Hadden, Brown University

• Melissa Jane Pavlik, Yale University