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Abstract
In the post-World War Two era, regional organizations have proliferated. The accompanying literature focuses on analysing the drivers and effects of regionalism, but has, to date, largely neglected a series of puzzling macro-phenomena: the marked spatial and temporal clustering of regional organizations, as well as similarities in their institutional design. This contribution argues that the existing approaches analyse regional organizations primarily as independent phenomena, whose genesis and design are seen as being determined either by dynamics internal to the region itself or by external forces such as powerful hegemons and globalizing pressures. Against this background, this research note argues for the broadening of existing analytical perspectives and sketches a diffusion-oriented research agenda that instead conceives of regional organizations as being interdependent.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We wish to thank Berthold Rittberger and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments, and James Powell for language editing. Moreover, Tobias Lenz gratefully acknowledges support from the European Research Council Advanced Grant no. 249543, ‘Causes and consequences of multilevel governance’.
Notes
Thus, this definition excludes the host of trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties concluded between different countries, and is in line with (re)current interest in ROs – rather than mere agreements (Hooghe and Marks Citation2012; Powers and Goertz Citation2011).
For a more detailed review of these analytical perspectives, see Jetschke and Lenz Citation(2011).
The homepage of the Comparative Regional Organizations Project provides information on the coding rules for selecting the ROs. Available online at: http://www.comparativeregionalorganizations.org.
We thank one anonymous reviewer for encouraging greater clarification on this point.
Institutional choice refers to generic institutional alternatives at the level below the ROs as a whole, while institutional design concerns the specific features of each generic alternative.