The Diffusion of Institutional Design Among Regional Organizations* Anja Jetschke, Patrick Theiner, Claudia Marggraf, Sören Münch (University of Göttingen) March 7, 2016 International Studies Association 57th Annual Convention, Atlanta, GA
Abstract
Why are there clones of the European Union (EU) in Africa and the Caribbean, i.e. regional organizations that are very similar to the institutional design of the EU? Why do regional organizations (RO) in general develop similar goals such as common markets or mechanisms of intervention within and across regions? Are such similarities the outcome of random co-evolution, functional adaptation, or are they the outcome of outside coercion? Questioning the standard explanations for the design of international institutions, the Comparative Regional Organizations Project (CROP) investigates the extent to which institutional designs are determined by processes of diffusion between regional organizations. This is motivated by two observations: First, a number of regional organizations are quite similar in their institutional design. Second, the emergence of regional organizations occurs in waves. Over the last five decades, states have decided at specific points in time to either establish regional organizations or to amend them. Both observations indicate that regional organizations and their member states take their decisions in dependence on the decisions of other regional organizations the similarity might be a consequence of diffusion. The project has begun to systematically code the characteristics and content of the founding and/or amending documents of more than 100 organizations, and developed an index of similarity between texts, and therefore institutions. The paper presents CROPs methodological approach and first substantive insights, such as a quantitative evaluation of the argument that some regional organizations develop a model character for other regional organizations.
Keywords: regional organization; diffusion; institutional design; regionalism; large-n; coding; quantitative text analysis; treaty design * Draft version, please do not cite or quote without authors’ permission. Financial support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) is gratefully acknowledged. Questions and comments should be addressed to
[email protected] or
[email protected].
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1 Introduction and State of the Art We live in an era of regionalization and regional organization (Haftel 2013; Katzenstein 2005; Mansfield and Solingen 2010; Paul 2012). Regional organizations (ROs) are defined here as organizations constituted by at least two contiguous states, which define their membership therein on a regional basis (e.g. African, Middle Eastern) and are multipurpose in scope. Since the mid-1980s the number of regional organizations has grown remarkably from 42 to almost 100 (Comparative Regional Organizations Project Dataset I) – a figure that does not include bilateral free trade agreements (see Figure 1, Appendix 1). In the wake of this second wave of regionalism the first having occurred in the 1960s after the establishment of the Treaty of Rome that would create the European Community, a vibrant literature on regional integration and comparative regionalism has developed. This literature has recently been joined by new approaches that explicitly depart from the perceived Eurocentrism of this literature and seek to systematically compare regionalism and regionalization broadly defined (Acharya 2012; Fawcett 2004; Hettne and Sderbaum 2000; Hurrell 1995; Sbragia 2008; WarleighLack and Van Langenhove 2010). Yet, despite the development of innovative research programs, the existing literature with only a few exceptions has neglected two key phenomena that characterize regional organizations: their institutional similarities and their wave-like emergence. Why do regional organizations reveal similarities when it comes to their institutional design? Why, for example, does the Andean Community look like a copy of the European Union – i.e. why do they have similar institutions and pursue similar policies? Or why have eleven regional organizations outside of Europe created a regional court based on the template of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), and why have they partly implemented its rulings even if there is little evidence of similar integration challenges being faced by them (Alter 2012)? The existing literature on international institutions provides three theoretical explanations for such similarities: functional necessity, random co-evolution, and more or less coercive external pressures. The first functional approach regards similarities as being the outcome of functional necessity (Sachzwang). In this case, the set of relevant regional institutions is determined functionally, i.e. by the type of cooperation problem that needs to be solved. Higher levels of interdependence are likely to create externalities and hence will be associated with greater regional institutionalization in the form of bureaucracies or specific dispute settlement mechanisms (Haftel 2013: 391; Hawkins et al. 2006: 15). The most prominent approaches are regional integration theories asserting that the technical regulation of cooperation problems requires regional institutions that later expand from economic or non-political
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realms into the political one (Haas 1970; Haas 2004 [1958]; Lindberg 1970; Malamud and Schmitter 2011: 147; Schmitter 2009). More generally, problem-structural approaches to international institutions start from similar assumptions (Hasenclever et al. 2002: 59f.; Koremenos et al. 2001; Mitchell 2006; Zürn 1997): Regional institutional similarities are the result of comparable levels of regional integration, as expressed by similar patterns of interdependence and lead to a specific institutional demand (Haftel 2007, 2013; Krapohl and Fink 2012; Mattli 1999). In contrast, explanations of random co-evolution place the focus not on the nature of the underlying problem structures, but on the configuration of state preferences and characteristics. Random co-evolution of institutional forms would occur where member states are arranged in similar constellations of interests or ideas. Rationalist (Haftel 2012; Hawkins et al. 2006; Koremenos et al. 2001; Milner and Kubota 2005; Solingen 1998) as well as constructivist approaches, focusing on the role of ideas of regional integration and legal cultures (Acharya and Johnston 2007; Duina 2006), are compatible with this view. Rationalist approaches view international institutions as the product or outcome of specific constellations of interests and structures: “[S]tates use international institutions to further their own goals, and they design institutions accordingly.” (Koremenos 2001: 762). More developed states or more democratic states agree on institutional designs that systematically differ from those of less developed or less democratic states (Milner and Kubota 2005; Solingen 2008, 2012). Because there is considerable cross-regional and intra-regional variation, organizational variance should correspondingly be high, and random co-evolution of institutional designs should be a correspondingly rare event: “Major institutions [are] organized in radically different ways” (Koremenos et al. 2001: 761). The third perspective emphasizes external pressures, either in the form of powerful actors coercing members of regional organizations into adopting specific policies and institutions, or of the pressures of globalization, which impose on regional organizations the need to adapt to system-wide challenges. This perspective is broadly compatible with realist and international political economy (IPE) approaches to regional organizations. Realist theories of international relations traditionally hold that international institutions in general, and regional organizations in particular, are established by a hegemon as a way to pursue its own core interests (Krasner 1976). “Regions are the creation of political power and purpose. Powerful states tend to extend their purposes beyond national borders through a combination of strategic action and sheer weight.” (Katzenstein 2005: 21). More recently, some authors have contended that the European Union has emerged as a powerful supporter of regional integration efforts worldwide (Schimmelfennig 2009, Tel 2007), doing so by acting as an external federator. Theories of IPE explain regionalism as an outcome and a rational response of political actors to
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structural changes in the world economy. The recent literature assumes that increasing integration and interdependence in the world economy and the tightened institutional arrangements that come with it also lead to the strengthening of regional integration (Mauro et al. 2008; Dees et al. 2007). Consequently, the expectation here is that increasing integration at a global level also leads to greater regional integration, with those states and regions that are more integrated into global structures also developing more similar regional institutions (Dees et al. 2008). While these theoretical approaches provide important insights into both why states establish regional organizations, and how these institutions subsequently develop, several facets of regional organizations pose a challenge to them. Dominant in this regard is the already mentioned enigma of why similarities of regional institutional design exist between groups of states that vary radically in their preferences and interests. Why, then, would groups of states as different as African and European ones choose similar institutional designs, as we see in the cases of the European Union and the African Union? How do we conceptually deal with the observation that many regional organizations take the EU or other regional institutions as models according to which they themselves intend to develop? Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, for example, declared in 2012 that the newly formed Eurasian Economic Community will take the European Community as its model. Recent approaches claim that such similarities are an outcome of forces operating between regional organizations in a horizontal fashion (Börzel and Risse 2009; Jetschke and Lenz 2013). This means that members of regional organizations do not act in isolation, nor do they determine institutional design and policy completely from scratch. Rather, they observe each other, draw lessons and look for model institutions that could be used as tem- plates for their own development. Such approaches speak of a diffusion effect on regional organizations. This field connects to an earlier literature that emerged in the context of comparative regional integration research in the 1970s, one which did not, however, have any lasting impact (Avery 1973). Thus far, despite the anecdotal evidence for diffusion effects being compelling, systematic evidence about the design of regional organizations and their possible determination by other such bodies elsewhere in the world is lacking.
2 Relevance We aim to address the identified research gaps and provide an innovative perspective on the institutional design of regional organizations around the globe, drawing on insights from the growing number of studies that are exploring diffusion processes between states and, in part, regional organizations in order to develop and test different sets of hypotheses about cross-regional similarities in formal organizational structures among regional organizations. We make the novel argument as part of the literature on comparative regionalism that diffusion matters for regional organizations. We
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investigate empirically whether regional organizations and their member states are influenced by other such institutions and will explore how – i.e. through which causal mechanisms – diffusion might influence the design of regional organizations. To achieve these goals, we are developing two datasets, one surveying regional organizations and the second focusing on diffusion variables. We focus on the similarities of any two regional organizations as indicated in their regional treaties, declarations and conventions, following the pioneering research of Zachary Elkins et al. (Elkins 2010; Elkins et al. 2010) on the diffusion of national constitutions. Elkins et al. Comparative Constitutions Project1 investigates the sources and consequences of constitutional choices. It also adopts a diffusionoriented approach. Our reasoning is that if members of regional organizations observe each other or are connected to each other, the result of these processes will most likely manifest itself in the agreements that the different regional organizations adopt. These agreements should, and will, hence be the focus of our analysis. The approach of analyzing a given regional organization’s institutional design and the external horizontal influences on it promises a better grasp of the design and development of regional organizations over time. First, on a very practical level, area specialists have long observed the adoption of similar regional integration projects and institutions, especially from Europe, by regional organizations in other parts of the world that subsequently generate little in the way of integration dynamics (Montecinos 1996). For example, the copies of the EU court in Africa do not behave as an integration motor as expected (Osiemo 2014). Hence, we contribute to the on-going discussion among area specialists on the gap between the stated goals of regional organizations and their implementation (Bach 1983; Malamud 2005; Martin Jones and Smith 2002; Gray 2014). A paucity of systematic evidence exists on what causes this behavior, but the diffusion of regional integration models does appear to play a role. Especially the sociological variant of diffusion would explain such outcomes as ’decoupling’, caused by the trend of organizational structures to become more alike (isomorphism) (Meyer and Rowan 1977). Little systematic attention has been paid so far to horizontal influences between regional organizations. This is all the more astonishing as external promoters of regional integration and cooperation are frequently mentioned in studies of regional organizations (Farrell 2005; Lombaerde and Schulz 2009; Tel 2007). Second, since the end of the Cold War, academic interest in international and regional oganizations and their governance practices has significantly increased (Goertz and Powers 2012; Hafner-Burton et al. 2008; Paul 2012). Regional organizations are conceptualized more and more as organizations contributing to the governance of international relations, doing so alongside the endeavors of global institutions (Hurrell 2007). The former are also increasingly being utilized to contest the hegemony of 1
www.comparativeconstitutionsproject.org
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Western institutions. Mapping the development of their institutional structures and specifying the possible channels of external influence will allow us to better determine whether the growth of regional organizations indicates a global development toward convergence or divergence. However, our investigation will have reached its limits where actual regional practices are concerned, as we will not focus on the proclaimed versus the de facto level of integration or on the effectiveness of regional organizations.
3 Diffusion: Mechanisms and Hypotheses The core features of the concept of diffusion (Busch and Jrgens 2007; Gilardi 2012; Holzinger et al. 2007; Holzinger and Knill 2005; Levi-Faur 2005) are that: It is a situation of interdependent, uncoordinated decision-making that is characterized by the voluntary adoption of specific institutions and policies (Aldrich 1979; Rogers 1983: 5f.). ‘Interdependent’ means that the decision of actor A alters the likelihood of actor B making a similar decision (Simmons and Elkins 2004). Neumayer and Plümper similarly define spatial dependence as existing whenever “the marginal utility of one unit of analysis depends on the choices of other units of analysis” (2010: 146). At its core, the concept of diffusion rejects the notion that actors take their decisions in isolation and hence independently of each other. Instead, actors observe each other and react to decisions made by their peers. Whether or not this interdependence arises is contingent on the level of interaction occurring between regional organizations. Most studies that focus on forms of cultural or policy transmission conceptualize the channels through which it occurs as ties or connections existing between units of a system. In the social sciences, these channels are usually grouped under various mechanisms that constitute causal mechanisms of transmission (Elkins and Simmons 2005; Holzinger et al. 2007; Simmons and Elkins 2004). We will follow this convention and identify the specific trigger mechanisms leading to similar institutions and policies being adopted. We will differentiate between five mechanisms, with each indicating a distinct channel of influence: learning; peer-based social learning; legitimacy-driven mimicry; competitiondriven mimicry; and soft coercion. In the following, we take great care to distinguish the individual diffusion mechanisms from another and what appears even more important to distinguish them from independent adaptations to external stimuli. Moreover, we try to find indicators for each mechanism that match the theoretical concepts underpinning the diffusion mechanisms, thus reflecting the current state of the debate on diffusion (Graham et al. 2013: 654).
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3.1 Learning Rational theories of diffusion emphasize the lessons that can be learned from following the example of a more successful regional organization. Learning refers to the change in beliefs, or the change in ones confidence in existing beliefs, that results from exposure to new evidence, theories or behavioral repertoires (Haas 1990; Sommerer 2011; Meseguer 2009). Actors assume institutional designs from elsewhere because they obtain information about the effectiveness of other institutions and policies, allowing them to better evaluate the consequences of making their own policy innovations. Actors can acquire new beliefs that only affect their evaluation of the appropriate means for achieving a goal (simple learning), but they might also acquire new beliefs about these goals themselves (complex learning). Actors not only respond to who does what but also to what happens when they do it (Lee and Strang 2006: 894). According to rational theories of learning, actors are Bayesian updaters. Bayesian updating is a rational process that assumes actors change their evaluations of the probability of an outcome based on any new information that they receive. The classical example of this is learning from success: in this case, members of an organization (or those willing to establish one) follow the lead of more successful organizations, which they observe period after period in a sequential updating process in order for lessons to be learned (Meseguer 2009: 39). H 1: Highly successful institutional and policy changes in regional organization A will be followed by similar changes in regional organization B. Similarity of agreements is driven by measurable policy success. While we acknowledge that regional organizations’ goals vary considerably, and that ‘success’ and the perception of it therefore also vary, we focus on two possible outcomes of regional integration that might serve as evidence for learning as an underlying mechanism of diffusion: learning from economic success and learning from peaceful change. We suggest those two factors because they are usually cited as the justifications for establishing regional organizations, with the European integration process providing a good illustration of this mechanism (Powers and Goertz 2011; Schiff and Winters 2003).
3.2 Peer-Based Social Learning (Social Learning) Sociological theories emphasize that rational learning can ‘go wrong’, in the sense that actors learn more easily from close peers or peers in their in-group and that the flow of ideas is mediated more effectively through existing communication channels and networks. Thus, they might learn wrong lessons just because they are better connected to specific actors. Ideas diffuse faster between states or groups of states that share more or denser network connections, which are also referred to as “direct ties”. As Beck et al. (2006) suggest, these direct ties can be any type of interaction that indexes the
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degree to which two regional organizations are likely to intensively interact, to be aware of each other’s policies and to serve as prominent referents for each other. This includes geographical proximity, similar language, culture and colonial history, shared membership in other organizations, or density of trade ties. H 2: Information will be filtered through specific channels of diffusion (direct ties). The more closely regional organizations A and B share these ties with each other, the more similar their agreements will be.
3.3 Legitimacy-Driven Mimicry (Legitimation) Constructivist and organizational sociologists focus on a different mechanism of diffusion, namely that of mimicry. This is defined here as the conscious adoption of a policy innovation out of a concern for status and legitimacy. Meyer et al. (1977) have shown that many organizations routinely adopt innovations that do not correlate with their capacities or endowments. Here, adopters obviously take up innovations because they value the prestige and legitimacy that is connected to them. They follow the logic of appropriateness. This theory would expect an across the board adoption of similar institutional designs even among extremely varying sets of states because particular institutional designs are associated with quasi-universal values of bureaucratic rationalization and modernity (Finnemore 1996; Meyer and Rowan 1977). Threshold models further posit that actors’ decisions will be influenced by the proportion of actors who have already made a similar decision or who have undertaken similar institutional reforms (Granovetter 1978). Several studies (Cao 2009; Fink 2013; Füglister 2011) find that international organizations influence policy convergence among states. Cao found the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to influence economic policies of member states. One could similarly assume that joint membership of the members of regional organizations in these international organizations also influences the institutional design of regional organizations, as when the choice for a dispute settlement body for economic disputes brings either the WTO mechanism or a court modelled after the European Court of Justice to the attention of member states (Alter 2012). H 3: System-wide trends partly promoted by international organizations increase the similarity of agreements of regional organizations A and B.
3.4 Competition-Driven Mimicry (Competition) Another important mechanism for diffusion is rivalry between competitors. Competition-driven mimicry describes a self-selection process between organizations that might equally lead to a similarity of institutions and policies. Here, what is adopted by one regional organization might also have
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profound consequences on other regional organizations. Similar formal structures might thus emerge as a result of actors competing for external resources. For example, many states around the world decided to reform regional organizations or to create new ones after the EU adopted the Single European Act (1986), and later the Maastricht Treaty (1992). Kathleen Hancock notes, for example, that “the EUs deepening integration and ensuing economic power have made many regional groupings eager to replicate its success”. She further notes the “pressures” of an “integration race” (Hancock 2009: 27). Since many regional organizations are established as a way to liberalize markets in the global competition for FDI, this mechanism is likely to positively affect the similarity of agreements in place as well. Simmons and Elkins (Simmons and Elkins 2004) and Elkins et al. (2006) found the rival policies of economic competitors to be a strong influence on the decision in favor of adopting liberalization policies. We approximate this particular mechanism of diffusion by drawing on the concept of ‘structural equivalence’ (Burt 1987). Structural equivalence models assume that it is position rather than direct ties that triggers diffusion. It is “the imitation of the behavior of others who are in a similar position in the social space, but not necessarily others with whom the potential adopter communicates” (Valente 1999: 14). We assume that states that are structurally equivalent with regard to their economic position (i.e. the space they occupy in the global production chain) or their power position in the international system develop similar regional organizations in a competitive bid for survival. To capture specifically the horizontal effects arising from competitors (and not just similar reactions by similarly positioned states to external globalization pressures), we assume that competition is driven by the FDI inflow to a regional organization as compared to its competitors. H 4: Regional organizations that compete for the same external resources and are in a similar structural position have more similar agreements.
3.5 Soft Coercion Rational material theories expect actors to adopt institutional designs that they would otherwise not accept if these institutions and policies are linked to specific resources that positively alter the costbenefit analysis of actors. The adoption of institutional designs might be costly to implement, for example, but the material incentives associated with them significantly offset these costs. In the case of European enlargement, EU conditionality has provided a key incentive for states wanting to become members of the EU to change their domestic structures and to implement EU regulations. A similar process might be what leads other regional organizations to adopt institutional designs from elsewhere. The EU has implemented program activities for many regions outside of Europe and foresees considerable amounts of financial support being given to regional integration
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around the globe (Farrell 2005, 2009; Lombaerde and Schulz 2009). The EU has supported regional economic integration efforts between the group of African, Caribbean and Pacific states (ACP), the MERCOSUR in Latin America and many regional organizations in Africa. Since 2003 it has also been providing assistance to the ASEAN (Martin 2009). Gray and Slapin (2012) show that regional organizations outside of Europe change their institutional structure in line with requirements articulated by the EU. These program activities are different from the ones provided by the UNCTAD, WTO or the OECD, as the EU is an important trade partner and has via market access offered greater leverage over the states that it does business with. H 5: The material resources associated with regional integration support by another regional organization increases similarity of agreements between A and B.
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Data We will proceed in two distinct steps. First, a dataset will be developed that allows us to describe
and analyze in detail the pattern of emergence and institutional development of regional organizations, as indicated by their agreements. This step requires the set-up of a simple (monadic) regional organization dataset. Second, our different hypotheses will be tested. This step requires the development of a second (dyadic) dataset, comparing any two agreements of regional organizations over time. Both datasets together then establish an overall database of regional organizations. The first dataset will capture the institutional characteristics of regional organizations established since 1945. We are particularly interested in the formal institutional structure of regional organizations. ‘Institutional structure’ refers to the institutions and policies mentioned in the regional organizations’ founding and amending agreements. We understand these to be regional organizations’ ‘constitutions’, defined here as a “set of institutions governing political decision-making” (Weingast 1995: 2). Thus, every regional organization in this sense has its own “constitution”, even if it neither necessarily binds its member states together in a meaningful way, nor meet more demanding criteria.
4.1
Dataset 1
To warrant inclusion in our dataset, we have adopted the following criteria for an entity’s designation as a ‘regional organization’: 1. It is established by at least two states who define their membership on a regional basis. 2. It is multi-purpose in scope. 3. It is sufficiently institutionalized to require regular meetings and decision-making rules.
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These criteria are more inclusive than the standard definition of the updated Correlates of War project (Pevehouse et al. 2004) or the latest Formal Intergovernmental Organizations (FIGO) project (Volgy et al. 2008: 851; see also Beohmer et al. 2004), which adopt similar criteria, such as formal entity, states as members, possession of a permanent secretariat, and autonomy. For the purposes of this study, organizations that consist of only two members still warrant inclusion, as they often form the nucleus of larger organizations, such as, for example, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA) as established between Venezuela and Cuba. The institution must further have a regionally defined membership, meaning that all states have to come from a particular geographic region (e.g. “West Africa”, “Caribbean”, “Pacific Rim”). Its scope must in theory or practice be multipurpose, in the sense that the organization offers the means to achieve a variety of ends. This excludes single-purpose organizations focusing on one issue such as OPEC, and strictly functional arrangements such as free trade agreements and currency unions, where means and ends are essentially congruent. Our definition does include entities without permanent organizational structures (such as a secretariat), as we believe that they constitute a distinct type of decentralized organization.2 We also include interregional organizations if they have a clear regional mandate and never meet outside the region. A list of regional organizations is included in Appendix 2. Our dataset will consist of “agreement events”, denoting when a regional organization was established or changed and what specifically has been amended in the case of the latter. Each case in the dataset (regional organization agreement) will contain basic information about: the regional organization and the agreement, the significance of changes, information on the number of members who have signed the agreement, the specified institutions for policy-making, the mentioned principles of cooperation, the number and fields of cooperation, membership rules, among other things. The dataset will be generated using a specifically designed questionnaire (sample questions are shown in Appendix 1). Additionally, we will collect key data on these organizations (average economic growth, number of interstate conflict onsets), on their institutionalized links to other organizations (as indicated by their observer status and institutionalized dialogues), on their openness to global trade and on the characteristics of member states (average score of democracy, average level of per capita GDP). This collation will be referred to as Comparative Regional Organizations Project Dataset 1. While some of these dimensions are also already included in existing datasets, ours will not only directly survey organizational characteristics but also measure connections to other regional and international organizations, thus providing ties to institutional similarities between regional organizations. Goertz and Powers (2012) examined 38 regional and international organizations that 2
One example is the EFTA in the 1960s. EFTA’s institutional design has been adopted by other regional organizations.
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were in existence during the period from 1980 to 2005. This dataset also focuses on multipurpose (“general”) organizations, but is much smaller than our dataset will be and has a different analytical focus, namely a “morphological description” (Goertz and Powers 2012: 1). The dataset of Haftel (2007, 2013) includes 28 regional organizations with a baseline year of 1980 and tracks primarily the institutionalization of them, as measured by the frequency with which member states meet, the degree of centralization and the membership rules. This dataset neglects diffusion processes altogether. Hooghe and Marks (Marks et al. 2014) are interested in the authority and independence of international and regional organizations. They evaluate 72 international and regional organizations with a baseline year of 2010 and collect data on the institutions involved in policy-making in order to determine their degree of independence from other member states as indicated by budgetary powers and their ability to sanction member states. This dataset is also designed to analyze the authority of regional organizations, and not their institutional similarity or the influence of regional organizations on each other’s institutional structure. None of these three datasets collect data on the links between regional organizations.
4.2 Dataset 2 In the second major step, we go beyond the detailed description and analysis of regional organizations and seek to theoretically as well as empirically contribute to the debate about the occurrence of diffusion processes between regional organizations. The dependent variable here is the similarity or convergence of agreements, as operationalized by a similarity index (see below). We understand convergence as a potential outcome in the form of an increasing similarity of policies, and diffusion as a process in which policy choices are interdependent. We seek to explore whether convergent institutional designs of regional organizations are caused by diffusion, and we control for other possible causes of convergence (see Fink 2013: 630). As its unit of analysis, Dataset 2 will have the dyadic relationship between the agreements of two regional organizations. A case in this dataset will therefore consist of the pairing between agreement X of a regional organization A and agreement Y of a regional organization B. Since the dataset is still in its early development, further details have been omitted.
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Reference Points and Codebook Design Over the past years, a number of data generation projects have emerged on regional organizations.
On the one hand, these projects make it necessary to distinguish our approach through the unique questions it asks: most research is primarily interested in the authority of regional organizations vis-a
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vis states, while we focus on the diffusion of institutional designs among regional organizations. On the other hand, the project poses a number of questions about how to measure certain properties of international organizations that have not previously been reflected upon. These questions are as important for the literature on comparative regionalism as they are for that on international organizations. The most important question resulting from this shift of analytical focus for the development of our codebook is: Where do the items come from when we design coding questions? Studying diffusion implies comparison, which in turn always requires, as Berg-Schlosser (Berg-Schlosser 2012: 44) noted, a tertium comparationes, a third dimension according to which the various ‘apples and oranges’ that exist among regional organizations are being compared. This is also true if we are primarily interested in studying similarities rather than differences - any comparison takes place against a third reference point with which regional organizations are compared and which establishes the very basis for constructing the codebook. While projects are generally transparent in regard to the chosen variables, discussions of the relevant concept of a regional organization are far rarer. In most cases, the implicit reference point is the state naturally, the resulting coding items for understanding regional organizations revolve around functions that are associated with state characteristics. For example, Goertz and Powers explicitly make the case that regional organizations evolve similarly to states, and they suggest their defining characteristics to be coercion, taxation, territory, and legitimacy (Goertz and Powers 2012: 3). In the project conducted by Hooghe, Marks, and Lenz on the Authority of International Organizations (AIO), the tertium comparationes is likewise the authority of the nation-state. While Hooghe et al (2012: 5) also discuss regional organizations as a contractual relationship between states willing to bind themselves and to delegate (2012:5-6), in the subsequent discussion they are more concerned with the delegation of competences to an intergovernmental or supranational organization that has state-like characteristics. Accordingly, their questions aim at the extent of delegation and pooling of authority. Hooghe et al thus survey both contractual elements of international organizations, and their state-like elements, such as the legislative process, budgetary competences and compliance procedures. Note that the tertium comparationes here is the Weberian state - an institution with a clearly defined territorial jurisdiction, a people, and a monopoly of violence. There are alternative ways to grasp state-like characteristics. The Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP) conducted by Ginsburg, Elkins and Melton looks exclusively at state constitutions (Elkins et al. 2010). These documents focus on enshrined rights, privileges and obligations, rather than the material or coercive characteristics of states. Accordingly, the CCP survey tool asks for both rights and formal characteristics of state constitutions and the existence of specific institutions, such as executive and
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legislative bodies. The difference between Goertz and Powers and Hooghe et al on the one hand, and Ginsburg et al on the other, is that the former conceive of the state in terms of the Weberian state, whereas the second conceptualize it as a Lockean state or a social contract. The important point here is that very different coding schemes follow from different tertia comparationis - the state or the social contract. Following the CCP, a codebook features more items focusing on the rights of regional organizations vis-a-vis their member states, the principles that guide the institutions and the specific distribution of competences it foresees for the institution. In short, it focuses much more on regional organizations as a political system than on their authority. Another way of approaching the subject is to screen the theoretical literature on international cooperation and international organizations. Of special interest are a number of studies explicitly focusing on the rational design of international institutions (Abbott and Snidal 2001; Hawkins et al. 2006; Koremenos et al. 2001). These studies share a number of similarities: Firstly, they ask why states seek to cooperate and design international institutions in the first place. Secondly, they investigate how institutions - conceptualized as agents with their own preferences - can be controlled. One consequences of this approach is that it concentrates on theorizing how factors external to an institution (the number of states, or the nature of the cooperation problems) determine its institutional design. Another one is an emphasis on mechanisms for the control of agents. For example, Koremenos et al (2001) suggest the following criteria to survey international institutions: membership rules, scope of issues covered, centralization of tasks, and rules for controlling the institution and flexibility of arrangements. Asking why states would act through international organizations, Abbott and Snidal (1998) focus on only two key functions of IOs: centralization (organizational structure and administrative apparatus) and independence (acting with a degree of autonomy within defined spheres) (Abbott and Snidal 1998: 4-5). Consequently, the reference point of comparison is not the state-ness of IOs, but which features make them perform better or worse in problem solving. Interestingly, although the literature focusing on delegation in IR appears to be closer to the literature on regional organizations, it shares with the CCP a distinct focus on international delegation as a social contract. Contracting in IOs raises similar questions to contracting by individuals in a state: how to control the agent, and how to find a balance between delegation and sovereignty. In sum, it becomes apparent that what authors deem important in a survey of the institutional design of international institutions is very much dependent on the reference point, the point of departure. Yet there is no ‘natural’ institutional design for regional organizations, as their functions show great variation. From a diffusion perspective, all projects raise the question whether to conceptualize regional organizations as institutions on the way of becoming state-like entities, or as international social contracts among sovereign states.
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5.1 Codebook for CROPDA I In order to create a relational dataset, the units of this dataset – regional organizations’ founding and amending treaties – must first be described comprehensively. Setting up the coding scheme faced three major challenges: Firstly, developing a set of questions that acknowledges that regional organizations are likely to be conceived in different ways (as having characteristics of a Weberian or Lockean state) and that makes it possible to detect diffusion in the first place. Secondly, selecting questions relevant to regional organizations from a macro-level perspective. Thirdly, avoiding biases towards prominent regional organizations, like the EU.
5.1.1 Structure and logic of the codebook As described in section 5, projects similar to CROP use questions based on their respective tertium comparationis like authority (Hooghe et al 2012) or Weberian state characteristics (Goertz and Powers 2012). CROP tries to build bridges between different strands by treating documents similar to constitutions, with as little culling of questions as possible based on theoretical concerns. The CROP codebook consists of 13 sections that each focus on different structural and procedural aspects of regional organizations. Overall, the codebook consists of 366 questions; the number of possible response items varies across the questions. Some questions are repeated several times throughout the codebook, such as those asking about different organs’ competences or membership. The first section, called GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS, consists of 39 descriptive questions about the treaty document itself, such as its original language, or the number and names of its signatories. The second section, BASIC PRINCIPLES, features five questions about the organization’s intended final outcome (e.g. economic integration or political federation), and the specific norms and values called upon by the treaty (e.g. rule of law or non-intervention). Taking inspiration from the Comparative Constitutions Project, the codebook contains five further questions on TRADITION AND SYMBOLISM, on whether state-like symbols such as flags or anthems are specified, for example. The fourth section, called SCOPE, moves away from the purely descriptive, and aims to survey which policy areas that are covered by the organization, based on the treaty at hand. The section helps connect our results to authors such as Koremenos et al (2001), who argue that scope of covered issues is a central analytical dimension for the comparison of institutions. The list of possible issues spans nine policy areas, such as economy, security, environment, and human rights (for the complete list see Annex 1). A part of the sub-sections is specific for each of these policy issues, and covers both concrete cooperation initiatives, and abstract concepts. As an example, the sub-section on environmental policies asks whether policies on biodiversity, endangered species, or renewable energies are specified by the treaty, whether abstract concepts such as sustainable development or green growth are mentioned, and
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whether there are references to other important documents such as the Kyoto Protocol. The remainder of the questions is identical across sub-sections and issues. With this combination of general and specific questions, we aim to ensure comparability while minimizing ‘wasted information’. This results in the sub-sections on economy, security, and human rights being longer than those on culture, social policies, or environment. Besides the scope of issues, arguably the most important dimension of variation between ROs is their institutional design. Starting from the concept of ‘centralization’ (Abbott and Snidal 1998: 4-5; Koremenos et al 2001), many authors suggest that a comparison of ROs should focus on the distribution of tasks and powers among the different organs of an RO. Following this reasoning, a major part of our codebook is dedicated to the INSTITUTIONAL ARCHITECTURE of the RO as specified in the treaty. The formulation of appropriate questions might at first glance not seem like a major challenge, given the enormous body of literature on the design of ROs and their organs. But during the codebook development, we realized that the treaty documents were vastly more nuanced than anticipated when describing the structure, processes, and tasks of an RO’s organs. Organs with identical membership and competences might have different names, while identical terms often meant different things in different treaties. Even general, abstract concepts like an RO’s ‘main decisionmaking body’ proved far more difficult to judge in reality. While “a rose by any other word would smell as sweet”, the same was most definitely not true for the councils, summits, conferences, and committees in the dataset. We thus chose to design the questions of this section as general and as agnostically towards anticipated vocabulary as possible. Instead of presuming a priori that a ‘Council’ organ is situated higher within the institutional hierarchy of the RO than a ‘Conference’, our codebook offers the generic options Organ A, B, C, D and E as sub-sections that are identical in terms of questions and items. Coders also have the freedom to code the document in any order. The identical sections help us to avoid biases towards expected institutional structures, to remain open towards variations in institutional designs, while still being able to identify functionally or semantically analogous elements across institutions. Each sub-section referring to the institution’s organs contains 24 questions, such as meeting frequency, selection of staff, and decision-making mode of the organ. Several questions about an organ’s competences are based on the policy-making cycle – from agenda-setting, to decision-making, to evaluation – to give coders an intuitive framework of reference (Lasswell 1956; Brewer and deLeon 1983). The sixth section enquires the treaty document with regard to a DISPUTE SETTLEMENT ORGAN. The 24 questions of this section are concerned with the structure, composition, and tasks of an organ that acts as a court-like mechanism. As some ROs occasionally have the capacity to act as single legal personalities, the codebook further includes a section that investigates whether the treaty document
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foresees any kind of institutionalized EXTERNAL REPRESENTATION and what this entails. Furthermore, we ask how the treaty document allows for external actors’ REPRESENTATION OF INTERESTS, if at all. As some organizations have particular specialized bodies like a central bank or a development funding mechanism, the codebook includes questions about REGULATORY AND OVERSIGHT BODIES. To capture any part of the institutional structure not covered by the aforementioned sections, coders have the possibility to register ADDITIONAL INDEPENDENT AGENCIES of the organization. As MEMBERSHIP features prominently in a number of works on international institutions, the codebook includes questions on membership criteria, rules for the suspension or exclusion of members, among others. The last substantive section AMENDING is again modelled on the Comparative Constitutions Project and examines the process of changing existing treaties and documents, such as who proposes and decides on amendments. Finally, the coding instrument requests coders to compile WORD FREQUENCIES of general concepts such as ‘freedom’ or ‘justice’.
5.1.2 Generating questions: A balance between deduction and induction The process of generating questions and items for a quantitative content analysis can be seen as a trade-off between deductive and inductive research logic. The debate over the most reliable epistemological approach to generate knowledge has basically been raging for centuries. While Mill´s typology of inductive methods remains influential until today (Mill 1875), the skepticism about the inductive method brought forward by – among others – Hume (Hume 2000 [1748)] and Popper (1994 [1935]) provide convincing arguments for the exclusive use of deductive reasoning. Without delving further into this epistemological discussion, we acknowledge the pitfalls related to both types of reasoning, and outline the practical problems during the codebook development. On the one hand, there are three strong arguments to rely on a deductive logic of questionnaire design: (1) First, a coding scheme for a project like CROP should take into account knowledge already attained about regional integration processes, regional organizations and their institutions. Therefore, theoretical considerations and empirical insights from the existing literature on comparative regionalism in the field should be consulted in order to generate relevant questions. (2) Second, a deductive generation of questions can prevent the codebook from being biased towards specific ROs that might have been preferred by the researchers due to their individual interests and experiences. However, the secondary literature might also be biased towards specific ROs if its selection does not reflect the empirical variation of regional organizations. (3) Third, an inductive logic necessarily relies on a small extract of the data, this sample would have to be representative in order to create an unbiased questionnaire. A deductive logic could avoid these problems. On the other hand, there are three plausible arguments for generating questions inductively: (1) If
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questions are not informed by at least some empirical knowledge of the research subject, the questionnaire’s theoretically derived categories and ideal types runs the danger of being too abstract, and too far removed from the documents themselves. (2) One of the research aims of CROP is to generate new insights into the development and diffusion of ROs and their institutions. Therefore, the project needs to go beyond existing assumptions and findings at some point, and cannot rely solely on the field’s existing literature. Rather, its coding scheme should allow for findings not yet anticipated by comparative regionalism scholarship. This can only be accomplished by using empirical impressions as a source of information in addition to theory. (3) Deductive reasoning might be useful to generate broad categories and the general outline of the questionnaire, but if the respective items ignore the empirical variance of the documents with regard to the formulation of similar issues, the analysis risks focusing on specific words instead of actual similarities and differences beyond language. As these arguments show, both logics have their merits, and can cause problems if applied exclusively. Thus, the researcher has to find a middle ground to generate a valid questionnaire. Having accepted this trade-off between deduction and induction, and trying to find a balance between them, it is perhaps even more important to be transparent about the process of question generation. For this reason, we will describe the process with respect to those sections of the questionnaire that were considered especially critical in terms of the deductive-inductive dichotomy.
6 Work Program The project is divided into two major phases: the development of a dataset on regional organizations; and a test of theoretically derived hypotheses on the diffusion of institutions and policies between regional organizations through the use of a separate dataset.
6.1 First Phase: Coding In the first phase the dataset on the institutional structures of regional organizations will be developed, the basis of which is the coding of founding and amending treaties and documents of regional organizations, as outlined above. We will study the formal characteristics of agreements as well as their constitutional designs. Formal characteristics of agreements refer, among other things, to the numbering of articles, the length of a document, its structure and depth, or the language used in it. We propose the “regional organization / agreement / year” (RO agreement) as the unit of analysis. Here, we depart from the established practices of similar studies on international and regional organizations (Elkins et al. 2010; Gleditsch 2002; Gleditsch and Ward 2006; Pevehouse et al. 2004), as we are interested in changes in the agreements of regional organizations, not in changes of status
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(e.g. war vs. no war). The first phase consists of a number of distinct tasks to be tackled in succession, some of which have already been completed. The universe of regional organizations to be included in the dataset has been defined. Any organization will be considered an RO if it: a) is constituted by at least two member states who define membership on a regional basis; b) is multipurpose in character; c) has some institutional framework for meetings and decision- making. This left us with 97 regional organizations created between 1945 and 2015 across all world regions, which can be found in Annex 3. Previous research had shown that the content and language of regional treaties is more than occasionally inspired by, or at least makes reference to, international treaties. To account for this, we added five international organizations (GATT, OECD, UN, UNDP, and WTO) to the dataset for comparative purposes. The final dataset thus includes 102 organizations and their respective founding and amending treaties. Furthermore, a questionnaire for the coding of RO treaties and agreements has been developed. This is based on Elkins et al.’s (2010) survey tool for the Comparative Constitutions Project, as our types of documents are comparable. Additional existing questionnaires, such as those used in the research on the design and authority of international institutions (Haftel and Thompson 2006; Marks et al. 2014), have also be consulted. The questionnaire was refined by several rounds of pretests, which were conducted in the framework of a graduate seminar on textual analysis and coding at the University of Göttingen. The 366 questions of the codebook can be divided into those relating to ‘inventory similarity’, and to ‘content similarity’. The first set of questions simply asks whether a particular institution or policy is mentioned in the document or not. Here, the idea is to “identify topics at a general level and thus measure broad areas of inclusion or exclusion (Elkins 2010: 984-85). The second set of questions evaluates choices between specific possible characteristics, or ‘content similarity’. Thus, we will obtain two types of data: dichotomous values on the existence of specific institutions and policies, and categorical values on the choices within specific items. We propose to follow Elkins et al. (2010), who calculate a similarity index by adding up the number of topics on which any two agreements concur and then dividing that total by the number of all topics included in the agreement. The resulting score will vary between 0 if two documents do not match on any item, and 1 if they agree completely (see the discussion in Elkins 2010: 986). One drawback of this method is that it assigns equal weight in the final index to every item. Due to the inherent substantive and computational difficulties of the remedy – individually weighing each question relative to all others, and justifying those choices – we so far believe this to be an acceptable alternative. We have also defined the list of documents to be coded. We will refer to our text corpus as ‘agreements’, and herein include legal treaties as well as the less binding protocols, declarations or
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conventions as many organizations are established on the basis of non-legally binding agreements. Agreements are either founding documents in which case they establish the organization for the first time or they are amending documents in which case they similarly change an existing institutional design and/or impact on the fields of cooperation. We thus will code, for example, the EU’s Treaty of Maastricht, but not the European Charter on Human Rights, as the latter only refers to the issue of human rights. Founding and amending agreements frequently have the status of organizational constitutions, as outlined above. Indicative of this status are the websites of regional organizations and the documentary histories in which key treaties are explicitly mentioned. While the number of regional organizations worldwide is currently relatively high, the restriction to founding and amending agreements limits the number of documents to be coded, as compared to other projects. Based on an overview taken of the key documents of regional organizations, we anticipate having to code over 400 documents. For the text of agreements, we will partially rely on those collected by Goertz and Powers (2012) who have already translated some of them into English. Where such sources do not exist, we will collect the data from various other sources: most importantly, the United Nations Treaty Series, the Yearbook of International Organizations, the International Monetary Fund’s Directory of Economic, Commodity and Development Organizations, and the websites of regional organizations themselves. For some regional organizations and older agreements, we expect having to undertake archival research, as their founding documents have not been made available in official publications. As of March 2016, we are entering the coding phase. We will code the formal structure of regional organizations in Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and transcontinental organizations, the issue areas in which cooperation takes place, and the policies set forth. Treaties will be fully hand-coded by team members and student assistants. Automated text analysis and machine learning to speed up coding verification could become part of the coding process in the future.
6.2 Second Phase: The Road Ahead How can we explain similarities between regional organizations? Our hypotheses have been designed in such a way as to specifically parse out the effects of diffusion on the institutional design of regional organizations. In this phase we will thus focus on collecting data on the diffusion and control variables, and conduct a thorough statistical analysis. The diffusion variables will be operationalized according to the indicators used in the comparative regionalism and regional integration literature, to statistics from the World Bank and other international organizations, to Eurostat and to other datasets. This will involve substantial data collection and coding, as country-specific indicators such as GDP, the level of democracy, and the
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number of conflicts will have to be aggregated and calculated for regional organizations. We are aware that we might face problems of data availability, especially for the early time period and for regional organizations outside of Europe. We will adapt our dataset accordingly. Data collection and coding of control variables will be conducted alongside our efforts on our main variables of interest capturing diffusion, and use similar sources. We will then use our dataset to test the different diffusion hypotheses. We will thoroughly discuss and evaluate the different estimation techniques discussed in the literature on diffusion, such as spatial maximum likelihood (SML) regression (Beck et al. 2006; Elkins 2010; Franzese and Hays 2008b; Hays et al. 2010), network autocorrelation regression models (Dow 2007), or multilevel (hierarchical) regression models (Gelman and Hill 2009). As we are interested in the nature and strength of these connections, we will opt for models including spatially lagged variables instead of spatial error models (Dow 2007; Ward and Gleditsch 2008: 6970). As discussed above, Dataset 2 will consist of observations of regional organization agreements, have a dyadic structure (pairs of agreements), and our dependent variable will be a discrete variable (ranging from 0 to 1), thus allowing us to work with directed dyads (Neumayer and Plümper 2010).
7 Coding Method The dataset CROPDA I will be generated by manually coding regional organizations’ founding and amending agreements using a specifically designed questionnaire3. We are aware of, and aim to minimize, the disadvantages of manual coding, and simultaneously apply the advantages of computerized techniques to our project. The decision to mainly apply hand coding for the documents was made for several reasons. First, „hand coding is associated with a high degree of validity” (Klüver 2015: 460). Hand coding gives coders the possibility to interpret and categorize the documents. They analyze respective text passages and only code after careful consideration which item suits best. Second, and closely linked to the first argument, our codebook is exceedingly detailed, seeing as we are interested in the sometimes subtle nuances of institutional design as described in a myriad of documents. To capture all relevant institutional characteristics, we constructed questions whose responses require a solid understanding of international organization, institutional design, and treaty design. This occasionally requires the kind of ‘reading between the lines’ which is not possible with the exclusive application of computerized techniques; as Basit (2003: 145) pointed out: “Coding and analysis are not synonymous, though coding is a crucial aspect of analysis”. Therefore, manual coding through human reflection can reveal necessary 3
See Chapter 5.1 for more details regarding the composition of the codebook.
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information which could not be extracted by the exclusive use of automated coding. A main argument against manual coding is the problem of inter-coder reliability. We conduct a full one-term seminar at the beginning of the project, and subsequent additional training workshops for all coders involved in the project. Each document will further be independently coded by at least two different persons. We believe these measures sufficiently strengthen the reliability of results. The project further aims to enhance the hand coding through automated text analysis. As a simple example, word frequencies are computationally trivial, yet time consuming for humans (Bunea/ Ibankas 2015: 432). Frequently used phrases, concepts, and terms can point to the diffusion of specific ideas and structures, and are therefore of particular interests for our analysis. Additionally, we intend to validate our hand-coded findings through automated analysis, and thereby take seriously Grimmer and Stewart’s warning that a “thorough reading of analyzed texts and an in-depth qualitative judgement about text characteristics is an absolute must for choosing the right method of content analysis” (Grimmer/ Stewart 2013: 270). To validate the findings from the hand coding process, we have introduced a quotation technique. When selecting an answer, coders must provide proof by quoting the portion of the document on which they base their information4. This is done not only for the purpose of validation, but also to preserve the chance of replication, which is a major concern for all large-n databases of hand-coded items. Test runs with two groups of coders – with only one of them required to provide proof – showed that participants coded more accurately and deliberately when they under the quotation requirement.
7.1 SurveyMonkey SurveyMonkey5 is an online survey platform which provides the interface for our codebook. It facilitates the coding process for several reasons. First, the codebook structure can be provided with an intuitive interface at little cost. Second, the clear structure and built-in failsafe elements reduce the error rate during the coding, as technical coding mistakes are unlikely to occur. Third, the administrator interface allows for a close monitoring of the process, down to the live tracking of individual coders; this also allows us to react quickly to questions and issues. Technical advantages of Survey Monkey are the cloud-based automatic saving and storage, as well as the possibility to export the results in a variety of formats for further analysis. Coders are able to interrupt their coding and continue at any time. Furthermore, its browser-based functioning makes coding intuitive and platform-independent. And lastly, coders can work independently of any specific 4 5
Coders should provide a minimum of one sentence, and maximum one paragraph, for their answer. www.surveymonkey.com
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location or device. SurveyMonkey presents itself as a worthwhile competitor to traditional, desktopbased coding using standalone software, or specially programmed interfaces that can incur high initial costs and require maintenance by the project team.
8 Preliminary Results In order to test our codebook, we ran a number of pretests with members of two successive graduate seminars at the University of Göttingen. Students were given specific documents to hand-code using an Excel-based instrument which contained a total of 740 questions about the institutional structure of regional organizations. Each individual document was analyzed by a minimum of two coders in order to gauge inter-coder reliability. We coded a total of 21 individual agreements corresponding to 18 regional organizations across all continents, with the time of ratification ranging from 1960 to 2007. Half of this sample was pre-determined by us, while the other half was randomly drawn from the full list of regional organizations. A list of these documents can be found in Annex 3. While the analysis of the coded documents and the building of both datasets has yet to be completed, there are a number of interesting patterns emerging already. For instance, regional organization agreements only very rarely mention other organizations on which they are (at least partially) modeled. Perhaps this is to be expected from documents that establish a new organization aiming to deliver added value for its members. Yet the extent of this is unexpected: the European Union is not mentioned as an inspiration at all, despite there being a number of organizations in the sample that are clearly inspired by its structures and processes (chief among them the African Union). The United Nations is mentioned as a model by ASEAN and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), even though it does not qualify as a regional organization. Instead of referencing other organizations, documents seem to most commonly draw on previous agreements by similar sets of member states, or previous organizational iterations (such as the Latin American Integration Association of 1980 being based on the earlier Latin American Free Trade Association). Even though regional organizations can in theory have any number of stated goals, in reality these almost always boil down to a triad of economic cooperation, differently understood ‘rights’, and common security. ‘Trade’ is mentioned in more than 75% of all documents, ‘rights’ in 60%, and 45% of documents make reference to ‘security’ as an organizational goal. Without exception, all documents state that economic cooperation is the main overall purpose of the agreement. While these results still fit the narrative of ROs as mostly functional tools to realize economic gains, our coding showed that almost 80% of all documents also make reference to norms, principles, and values. In cases such as ASEAN, such principles even take pride of place in the preamble and multiple articles of the document. As a result, ASEAN promotes more than 20 different norms throughout its charter, from solidarity, to
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sovereign equality, to democracy, to welfare promotion. In contrast, MERCOSUR only explicitly references freedom as a value to be fostered by the organization. In terms of the actual organizational structure, we found that several institutions - such as the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization and IGAD - have organs that are tasked with guiding the organization, but that do not have any legislative or executive functions. Normally, these are organs assembling members’ heads of state. Similarly, several organizations lack any form of administrative organ or permanent secretariat, among them EFTA and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). Another design trend are committees or agencies dedicated to specific issue areas that are within the organization’s scope – more than 70% of the analyzed documents included this element. All surveyed organizations have three or fewer issue-area, functional organs; COMESA is a positive outlier with 15 of these sub-agencies. Decision-making, political organs are one of the core features of regional organizations that allow them to set their own course and agenda. The surveyed documents create an average of 1.9 decisionmaking bodies, meaning ROs often do not have only one policymaking nexus, but instead a somewhat distributed, checks-and-balances system of decision-making. However, irrespective of their competences, all decision-making bodies in our sample operated on consensus, rather than majorities. Lastly, different organs’ competences and their wording were a special focus during this round of coding. The results were extremely varied: MERCOSUR’s main decision-making body has only two specified competences (general policy, and procedural decisions), while more complex, and more integrated, institutions such as COMESA can have up to a dozen (among them the re-structuring of organs, and the appointment of a secretariat and other officials). Taken together, no very clear picture emerges from our pretests as to which specific institutional features have seen especially widespread adoption, with the possible exception of issue-area committees. If anything, our coding has shown that the variance between organizations, their institutional design, and the wording and language of the corresponding documents, is far greater than anticipated. Along the same lines, no individual RO seems to be especially successful in terms of a diffusion of their institutional design. We expect these results to change as more documents are coded and more complex methods applied to our datasets.
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Annex 1: Overview Codebook Sections
1. General characteristics (39 questions) 2. Basic principles (5 questions) 3. Tradition and symbolism (5 questions) 4. Scope (Areas of cooperation) (total 69 questions) 4.1 Economy (17 questions) 4.2 Security (11 questions) 4.3 Migration (5 questions) 4.4 Environment (5 questions) 4.5 Good Governance (5 questions) 4.6 Social policies (5 questions) 4.7 Culture (5 questions) 4.8 Human Rights (10 questions) 4.9 Infrastructure (5 questions) 5. Institutional Architecture (total 164 questions) 5.1 Organ A (24 questions) 5.2 Organ B (24 questions) 5.3 Organ C (24 questions) 5.4 Organ D (24 questions) 5.5 Organ E (24 questions) 5.6 Parliamentary Organ (23 questions) 5.7 Standing and Technical Committees (20 questions) 6. Dispute Settlement (24 questions) 7. External representation of the RO (4 questions) 8. Representation of interests (22 questions) 9. Regulatory and oversight bodies (16 questions) 10. Additional independent agencies (1 question) 11. Membership (6 questions) 12. Amending process (7 questions) 13. Word frequencies (4 questions)
Annex 2: Sample view of the codebook
Annex 3: Organizations included in the dataset6
Name
Abbreviation Year
Region
African and Malagasy Union African Economic Community *
OCAM AEC
1961 1991
Africa Africa
African Union *
AU
2001
Africa
Afro-Malagasy Union
AMU
1961
Africa
Arab Maghreb Union
AMU
1989
Africa
Central African Economic and Monetary Community
CEMAC
1999
Africa
Central African Union
CAU
1968
Africa
Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa *
COMESA
1994
Africa
Community of Sahel-Saharan States
COMESSA
1998
Africa
Council of the Entente
CE
1959
Africa
East African Community
EAC
2000
Africa
Economic Community of Central African States
ECCAS
1981
Africa
Economic Community of Great Lake Countries
CEPGL
1976
Africa
Economic Community of West African States *
ECOWAS
1975
Africa
Inter-Governmental Authority on Development
IGAD
1996
Africa
Liptako-Gourma Integrated Authority
LGA
1970
Africa
Mano River Union
MRU
1973
Africa
Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries
OAPEC
1968
Africa
Southern African Customs Union
SACU
1969
Africa
Southern African Development Community *
SADC
1992
Africa Africa
West African Economic and Monetary Union
WAEMU
1994
West African Economic Co-operation
CEAO
1963/73 Africa
West African Monetary Zone
WAMZ
1994
Africa
Central American Integration System Central American Parliament
SICA/CACM PARLACEN
1991 1991
Americas Americas
Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement
CAFTA-DR
2004
Americas
Alianza Bolivariana para los pueblos de nuestra America
ALBA
2004
Americas
Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization *
ACTO
1978
Americas
Andean Community (Andean Pact)
AC
1969
Americas
Association of Caribbean States
ACS
1994
Americas
Caribbean Community *
CARICOM
1973
Americas
Central American Democratic Community
CDC
1982
Americas
Central American Integration System
SICA
1991
Americas
Latin American Economic System
LAES/SELA
1975
Americas
Latin American Integration Association *
LAIA
1980
Americas
North American Free Trade Agreement
NAFTA
1994
Americas
Organization of American States
OAS
1948
Americas
Organization of Central American States
ODECA
1951
Americas
Organization of Eastern Caribbean States
OECS
1981
Americas
Southern Common Market *
MERCOSUR
1991
Americas
Union of South American Nations *
UNASUR
2004
Americas
6 A
star (*) denotes organizations included in the pretest.
Name
Abbreviation
Year
ACD
2002
Asia
Asian and Pacific Council
ASPAC
1966
Asia
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
APEC
1989
Asia
Association of South East Asian Nations *
ASEAN
1967
Asia
Association of Southeast Asia
ASA
1961
Asia
Commonwealth of Independent States *
CIS
1991
Asia
Asia Cooperation Dialogue
Region
Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States
CCTS
2009
Asia
Economic Cooperation Organization
ECO
1985
Asia
Eurasian Economic Community
EurAsEC
2000
Asia
Melanesian Spearhead Group
MSG
1988
Asia
Organization of Central Asian Cooperation
OCAC
1991
Asia
Pacific Islands Forum *
PIF
1971
Asia
Secretariat of the Pacific Community / South Pacific C i i Cooperation Organization Shanghai
SPC
1947
Asia
SCO
1994
Asia
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
SAARC
1985
Asia
Southeast Asian Friendship and Economic Treaty
SEAFET
1957
Asia
Southeast Asian Treaty Organization
SEATO
1954
Asia
Baltic Assembly Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference
BA BSPC
1991 1999
Europe Europe
Benelux Union
BU
1958
Europe
Central European Initiative
CEI
1989
Europe
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
CMEA
1949
Europe
Council of Europe
CE
1949
Europe
Council of the Baltic Sea States
CBSS
1992
Europe
European Economic Area
EEA
1994
Europe
European Free Trade Association *
EFTA
1960
Europe
European Union *
EU
1993
Europe
Group of Schengen
1985
Europe
Nordic Council *
NC
1952
Europe
Organization for Democracy and Economic Development
GUAM
2001
Europe
Organization for European Economic Development *
OEEC
1948
Europe
Regional Cooperation Council
RCC
2008
Europe
Warsaw Treaty Organization
WTO
1955
Europe
West Nordic Council
WNC
1985
Europe
Western European Union
WEU
1948
Europe
Arab Cooperation Council Black Sea Economic Cooperation
ACC BSEC
1989 1992
Middle East Middle East
Economic Cooperation Organization
ECO/CENTO
1985
Middle East
Gulf Cooperation Council *
GCC
1981
Middle East
League of Arab States
LAS
1945
Middle East
African, Caribbean and Pacific Group Arctic Council
ACP AC
1975 1996
Transcontinental Transcontinental
Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty
ANZUS
1951
Transcontinental
Name
Abbreviation Year
Region
CP
1950
Transcontinental
Council of Arab Economic Unity
CAEU
1957
Transcontinental
Eurasian Economic Union
EAEU/EEU
2015
Transcontinental
Indian Ocean Commission
IOC
1982
Transcontinental
Indian Ocean Rim-Association for Regional Cooperation
IOR – ARC
1997
Transcontinental
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NATO
1949
Transcontinental
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
OSCE
1975
Transcontinental
Organization of Black Sea Economic Cooperation
BSEC
1992
Transcontinental
Colombo Plan
Organization of Islamic Conference
OIC
1969
Transcontinental
Union for the Mediterranean
UFM
1995
Transcontinental
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GATT
1948
International
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
OECD
1961
International
United Nations
UN
1945
International
United Nations Development Programme
UNDP
1965
International
World Trade Organization
WTO
1994
International
