Individual staffers at international organizations matter for policy output: mission chiefs at the IMF bring heterogeneous ideological biases to their jobs and those biases shape the policies the organization imposes.

🧾 What Was Studied

• Collected individual-level career information on 835 IMF “mission chiefs” (the staffers primarily responsible for a given member state).
• Matched those career records to newly coded data on more than 15,000 IMF-mandated policy conditions covering 1980–2016.

🗂️ How the Research Is Identifying Staff Influence

• Treats mission chiefs as purposive actors whose personal ideological biases can affect on-the-job policy choices.
• Leverages cases where the same mission chief is appointed to different countries over a career to isolate staff-level effects from country-level factors.

🔎 Key Findings

• Individual mission chiefs influence the number, scope, and content of IMF conditions according to their personal ideological biases.
• The within-chief variation across different country assignments provides evidence that these effects are driven by staff preferences rather than solely by recipient-country needs or IMF institutional rules.
• Results illuminate the microfoundations of IO policy output by showing how individual-level heterogeneity among bureaucrats maps onto organizational decisions.

⚖️ Why It Matters

• Demonstrates a concrete mechanism through which individual bureaucrats shape international policy, with implications for debates about the accountability and legitimacy of international organizations.
• Suggests that who is appointed to operational roles at IOs can systematically alter policy outcomes, raising questions for oversight, selection, and internal checks.