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Influence in international conferences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

George A. Codding Jr
George A. Codding Jr
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
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Extract

A valuable source of data for the international organization researcher is interviews with delegates sent by their governments to participate in international conferences and meetings. With the appearance of many newly independent states in the 1960s and early 1970s, the size of international conferences and the workload of the individual delegate have grown to such an extent that it has become difficult to tap this resource effectively.

Type
Research note
Information
International Organization , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , Autumn 1981 , pp. 715 - 724
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1981

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References

1 For an excellent account of the limitations of various approaches to obtaining data from delegations to international conferences, see Jacobson, Harold K., “Deriving Data from Delegations to International Assemblies: A Research Note”, International Organization 21, 3 (Summer 1967): 592–613CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 As it turned out, the conference, which opened on Thursday, 27 September 1979, and ended on Thursday, 6 December 1979, had representatives from 140 member countries amounting to more than 2,000 individual delegates and 14,000 rather than the 10,000 proposals that had been expected.

3 Subtitled Decision Making in International Organization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar. The reader interested in the scope of international organization theory in general should consult Dixon, William J., “Research on Research Revisited: Another Half-Decade of Quantitative and Field Research in International Organizations”, International Organization 31, 1 (Winter 1977):65–82CrossRefGoogle ScholarAlger, Chadwick F., “Research on Research: A Decade of Quantitative and Field Research on International Organizations”, International Organization 24, 3 (Summer 1970): 414–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Taken from IBRD, Atlas (Washington, D.C., 1978)Google Scholar.

5 United Nations Statistical Yearbook, 1978 (New York, 1979), pp. 345–48 and 627; andGoogle ScholarUNESCO Statistical Yearbook, 1976 (Paris, 1977), pp. 1002–1007 and 1015–1019Google Scholar.

6 It should also be noted that the data do not indicate whether the frequency is in actual use, but they do include all frequencies for which a state desires international recognition and protection from harmful interference—a not inconsiderable requirement.

7 See ITU, CAMR 79 List of Participants, Geneva, 26 September 1979, and Supplements No. 1 (8 October 1979), No. 2 (16 October 1979), No. 3 (23 October 1979), and No. 4 (31 October 1979).

8 The Rules of Procedure for ITU Conferences provide a time limit for the submission of proposals so that the ITU secretariat can circulate the majority of proposals to members with sufficient time to analyze them before the conference starts.

9 The results of the interviews will be the subject of another article.

10 It is also the tradition in meetings of this type to permit theparticipants to decide to a certain extent what version of the events that took place isto appear in the final versions of the documents that are issued. This is done in spite of the fact that only the summary records of the plenary meetings are made available to the general public. The limited nature of the documentation that is issued to those who are not delegates to the conferences and the tradition of letting delegates them-selves determine just what will be recorded is described by one outspoken delegate as the work of “a mutual protection association”.

11 The SPSS program was used at the University of Colorado Computer Center on a Control Data Corporation 6400.

12 Although, it should be noted, there was a strong correlation between the first four.