This introduction to the Special Issue reviews the existing literature on the domestic politics of international organizations (IOs), presenting them within a unified theoretical framework. We emphasize the central role of domestic forces in the study of IOs: how individual preferences are channeled through domestic political institutions, and ultimately inform a government’s foreign policy decisions toward and within IOs. We show that these forces can be distilled into a game between citizens in which they select welfare weights to be assigned to citizens across the globe. We refer to this as the Citizens’ IO Game. The contributions in this Special Issue and previous studies are discussed in the framework of the Citizens’ IO Game, which offers fresh insights into the intersection of domestic constitutions, politics, resource distribution, and IO membership and policy. We construct a specific application to trade policy to further clarify the role of the framework. Using this example, we show that global externalities can never be fully internalized through IOs when sovereignty is prioritized. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research on the domestic politics of IOs.

本期特刊的导言回顾了关于国际组织 （IO） 国内政治的现有文献，并在统一的理论框架内进行了介绍。我们强调国内力量在 IO 研究中的核心作用：个人偏好如何通过国内政治机构引导，并最终为政府针对 IO 和在 IO 内部的外交政策决策提供信息。我们表明，这些力量可以提炼成公民之间的游戏，在游戏中，他们选择分配给全球公民的福利权重。我们将其称为 Citizens' IO Game。本特刊和以前研究的贡献在公民 IO 游戏的框架内进行了讨论，该游戏为国内宪法、政治、资源分配以及 IO 成员资格和政策的交叉点提供了新的见解。我们构建了一个具体的贸易政策应用程序，以进一步阐明该框架的作用。通过这个例子，我们表明，当主权被优先考虑时，全球外部性永远无法通过 IO 完全内化。最后，我们提出了 IO 国内政治的未来研究方向。