Liesbet Hooghe is the W.R. Kenan Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill and Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. In 2017 she received the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar Award of the APSA. Born and educated in Belgium with a PhD. from the KU Leuven, she was a Fulbright fellow at Cornell University and a postdoctoral fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. She joined the University of Toronto in 1994 and moved to UNC-Chapel Hill in 2000. Between 2004 and 2016, she also held the Chair in Multilevel Governance at the VU Amsterdam. Hooghe is the former chair of the European Politics Society section of the APSA and of the European Union Studies Association. Her chief focus is multilevel governance, European integration, political behavior, and international organization.
Tobias Lenz is Assistant Professor of Global Governance and Comparative Regionalism at the University of Goettingen, and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg. During the academic year 2015/16, he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence. Previously, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in a research project on the authority of international organizations, directed by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, at the Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Lenz holds a PhD in International Relations from Oxford University and has held visiting fellowships at the Free University of Berlin, UNC Chapel Hill, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research deals chiefly with global and regional organizations, institutional design and change, legitimacy and diffusion.
Gary Marks is Burton Craige Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, and a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. He was educated in England and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He was a recipient of the Humboldt Forschungspreis (Humboldt Research Prize) in 2010 and of a EUR2.5 million Advanced European Research Council grant (2010-2015). In 2017 he received the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar Award of the APSA. He co-founded the UNC Center for European Studies and EU Center of Excellence in 1994 and 1998, respectively. Marks has had fellowships at the Free University of Berlin, the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg, Pompeu Fabra, the Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna, Sciences Po, Konstanz University, McMaster University, the University of Twente, and was National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His research and teaching are chiefly in comparative politics, multilevel governance, and measurement.
International organizations have come to play a central role in world politics. The authors present a major new attempt to explain the difference - and the similarities - between them, as well as their crucial role