Who Speaks for the IOs? When Bureaucrats Mediate Global Advice

Whether and how International Organizations (IOs) influence member states is an ongoingdebate. One argument is that domestic bureaucrats serve as a link, mediating IO advice athome. Bureaucrats are often motivated to serve as advocates not only when IO advice alignwith their preferences, but also because endorsing such advice can enhance their own cred-ibility. Yet this theory has seldom been tested empirically. This paper addresses that gap.Drawing on new data from the case of Brazil, this paper finds domestic bureaucrats are keyactors for making IO advice relevant to domestic politics and even legislation. This study usesan original dataset of 1,200 Brazilian Senate commission transcripts from 2013–2022, andshows that bureaucrat participation leads to significantly more mentions of IOs during hear-ings of legislation and other Congressional matters. Also, 61 public hearings and testimonieswith over 90,000 speaker-level utterances from the Senate inquiry into the government’sresponse to the Covid-19 pandemic are analyzed. Bureaucrats are more likely to mentionIOs - namely, the World Health Organization (WHO) - in their testimony than any other typeof speaker. Career civil servants were also more positive when mentioning IOs comparedto others. These findings are complemented by interviews with bureaucrats and politicians,as well as ethnographic observation of Senate hearings. This paper contributes to debateson IO influence by highlighting the critical dynamics between international organizations,governments, and domestic bureaucrats in shaping how global advice is received and used.