Who Rules the World? The Myth of Multipolarity and The Real Drivers of Leadership in International Organizations
The growing prominence of the global South in trade, finance, and politics has been widely viewed as a structural shift in the global power balance, particularly with the rise of BRICS countries, led by China. This paper 4 challenges such narratives by empirically examining leadership representation in international organizations (IOs). Using a novel dataset covering 186 IOs and over 5,000 leader-year observations from 1997 to 2022, we analyze the determinants of country representation in IO leadership positions. Contrary to expectations, we find that traditional indicators of power, such as GDP size or income levels, do not significantly influence leadership shares. Instead, global trade and FDI shares emerge as key determinants. Strikingly, a country’s representation is overwhelmingly influenced by path dependency, with previous leaders’ nationalities predicting future representation with up to 94% accuracy. Additionally, we explore variations across multilateral, transnational, and civil society IOs, finding the strongest path dependency to be in civil society organizations, which is surprising as these are often understood to be the most fluid and least state-based among IOs. Our findings debunk the myth of multipolarity and reveal that compared to the North, Emerging and other Global South nations are underrepresented in IO leadership even after controlling for the size of their economies and other covariates. This research highlights the importance of leadership in understanding global governance and calls for a nuanced interpretation of power beyond conventional economic or military metrics.