Martin, Lisa, and Beth Simmons. "Theories and Empirical Studies of International Institutions". International Organization, Vol.52, No.4 (1998): 729-757.

Martin, Lisa, and Beth Simmons. "Theories and Empirical Studies of International Institutions". International Organization, Vol.52, No.4 (1998): 729-757.

• In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, most scholarship on international organization were extremely critical and pessimistic; the organizations were woefully underdeveloped to meet the tasks assigned to them, and they were assumed to still be subject to Cold War politics (730-731).
• The questions regarding international institutions in the 1940s and 1950s were how these organizations were being used to mediate relations between great powers and whether their presence affected state behavior, specifically the influence of international law (731).
• By the 1950s, the consensus was that international organizations had a limited, but positive, impact on the foreign policy of countries. In particular, it raised the profile of controversial issues and increased public scrutiny of state actions. Some scholars also suggested that it made cooperation less costly (731-732).
• From the mid-1960s, frustration at the paralysis of the UN Security Council [UNSC] due to the use of the veto led scholars to increasingly focus on the UN General Assembly [UNGA]. Despite caution that voting in the UNGA served a different purpose than national legislators, scholars attempted to use the behavior of the UNGA to predict global political trends. This trend  was largely motivated by the ease of access to quantifiable data from the UNGA (733-734).
• In the 1970s, the theory of 'neofunctionalism', based on the work of Ernst Haas, became very influential in studies of international institutions. The theory held that the behavior of actors and interest groups are shaped by associating actions with rewards, meaning that the presence of rewards from international organizations should affect the behavior of international actors (735).
• The neofunctionalist school of research has popular, but never managed to solve three essential problems: no consensus on changes in public attitudes towards international institutions; no connection between attitudes and actual policy changes; no method of overcoming the self-selection bias within ministries of foreign affairs, wherein the staffers with the most interest in international institutions would be the ones working with them (736).
• By the 1970s, scholars began to increasingly doubt the power of international organizations, which had failed to prevent the Vietnam War, the end of the Bretton-Woods system, or the economic power of OPEC. Focus instead shifting onto 'international regimes', the norms regulating state behavior, which often existed outside of formal organizations (736-737).
• Early scholarship on international regimes was severely critical, often noting how a small number of actors controlled the function of important regimes with extremely unequal or unfair outcomes (737). 
• Later scholarship on international regimes largely abandoned its critical focus on the outcomes of international regimes, instead focusing on how international regimes are created or changed. This aspect of research also dovetailed with some research of the constructivist school of IR on international norm creation (737-738).
• By the mid-1980s, research on international regimes began to be absorbed into larger discussions of international cooperation by the neoliberal school of IR theory. As a result, research became less interested on state behavior and more focused on the technical benefits of international organizations as mediums for facilitating cooperation (738).
• Since the 1980s, research on international institutions, largely absorbed into the neoliberal school of IR, has been focused on a debate with the neorealist school of IR over whether international institutions affect state behavior. This debate has structured the research agenda, causing scholars to treat all states as unitary and rational actors, and ignoring the ways in which different institutions may shape the behaviors of different states (742-743).
• One of the major weaknesses of theories of international institutions have been that they have been created by taking concepts used for domestic politics and trying to transfer them to international relations. However, many of the core assumption of domestic politics do not apply to IR as the international order is anarchic (739).
• Rationalist and rational-choice theories are a general exception to the failures of transferring theories of domestic politics to IR, as their basic assumptions about self-interested actors operating within structural constraints are applicable at both the domestic and international level (742).
• The author claim that the most productive field of study to emerge on international institutions has been game theory, especially when combined with the rational choice model (744). The work of Stephen Krasner further informs this approach, as it demonstrates that behaviors in game theory change when the game is iterative, as IR almost always is (745).
• New research agendas regarding international institutions should focus more on the differences between different models of international organizations and in what circumstances these different organizational models are used. Specifically, what issues are institutionalized, whether processes are deliberative or based on 'depoliticized' expert opinion, when these organizations are employed instead of bilateral relations (746-747).
• The authors also urge scholars to focus more on issues of international cooperation within domestic politics, particularly what kinds of national politicians will endorse international organization and which will be opposed to more power be diverted to the international level (748).
• The research agenda must be expanded to include recognition of the unexpected consequences of international organizations, something not acknowledged in current scholarship, which assumes that actors fully understand all aspects of agreements they make. Unexpected changes from decisions about voting systems in international organizations have particular potential as a field of study (749-750).

The authors write a brief history of changes in the academic scholarship on international institutions from the 1940s to the 1980s, at which point the subject becomes dominated by a pointless debate between neoliberals and neorealists over whether international organizations matter. The authors think that it should spread out from this, but also have some really fucking retarded ideas about what should be studied instead.