Recent decades have witnessed the emergence and spread of a broad range of liberal norms in global governance, among them sustainable development, gender equality, and human security. While existing scholarship tells us a lot about the trajectories of particular norms, we know much less about the broader patterns and sources of commitments to liberal norms by international organizations (IOs). This article offers the first comparative large-N analysis of such commitments, building on a unique dataset on IO policy decisions over the time period 1980-2015. Distinguishing between deep norm commitment and shallow norm recognition, the analysis produces several novel findings. We establish that IOs' deeper commitments to liberal norms primarily are driven by internal conditions: democratic memberships and institutional designs more conducive to norm entrepreneurship. In contrast, legitimacy standards in the external environment of IOs, often invoked in existing research, mainly account for shallower recognition or "talk" of norms.

中文翻译：

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为什么国际组织致力于自由规范

最近几十年来，全球治理中广泛的自由规范的出现和传播，包括可持续发展，性别平等和人类安全。虽然现有的奖学金可以告诉我们很多关于特定规范的轨迹，但是我们对国际组织（IOs）对自由规范的承诺的更广泛的模式和来源知之甚少。本文基于1980-2015年间有关IO政策决策的唯一数据集，对此类承诺进行了首次较大的比较分析。在区分深层规范承诺和浅层规范识别之间，该分析产生了一些新颖的发现。我们确定，IO对内部自由规范的更深层次的承诺主要是由内部条件驱动的：民主会员制和制度设计更有利于规范创业。相反，在现有研究中经常引用的IO外部环境中的合法性标准主要是对规范的较浅的认可或“交谈”。