Representation and Power in International Organization: the Operational Constitution and its Critics

Abstract

In 2005, when James Wolfensohn announced that he would not seek a third term as president of the World Bank, few doubted that another United States national, the choice of the U.S. president, would take his place. Each of the previous eight presidents of the bank had been an American, dating back to the international financial institution's establishment in 1946,and despite private and public grousing by some over the Bush administration's eventual choice of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz as Wolfensohn's successor, the appointment was never truly in jeopardy. When the bank's executive directors met to elect a new president, the vote was a foregone conclusion—not because the United States holds a majority of votes itself (it does not), but because a longstanding informal agreement between the United States and the bank's western European stakeholders prescribed that outcome.