From Autonomy to Aggrandizement: A Comparative History of Executive Power, Corruption, and Democratic Backsliding in International Sport Federations

Executive power in international sport federations has been consolidated through long historical sequences in which formal democratic institutions survived while their constraining force declined. A comparative history of the International Weightlifting Federation, International Boxing Association, and Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) traces three pathways: long-term internal entrenchment in weightlifting, recognition collapse and geopolitical patronage in boxing, and reform absorption in football. A shorter contemporary epilogue identifies related electoral and oversight disputes in the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) without assigning an unfolding episode the same historical depth as the three principal cases. Democratic-backsliding theory supplies the central interpretive framework because federation capture rarely depends on abolishing congresses, elections, ethics bodies, audit procedures, or reform programmes. It develops through the cumulative control of appointments, money, information, candidacy, integrity systems, and member dependence. Corruption consequently emerges as an institutional process that orders access, loyalty, and dissent. The comparison places recent governance crises within histories extending from the 1970s transformation of international sport administration to the reform ruptures of the 2010s and their contested afterlives. Democratic language can legitimize executive dominance inside transnational private regulators whose authority is formally private, globally consequential, and frequently shielded from ordinary public-law constraint.