Project Details
Projekt
Are Regional Organizations Contagious? - Diffusion and the Institutional Design of Regional Organizations
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Anja Jetschke
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
from 2014 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 265396118
Are there models of institutional design of regional organizations and if yes, how many? How does the institutional design of regional organizations evolve over time and space? Do the designs converge or do they have different trajectories of evolution? What determines this trajectory? The project expands the Comparative Regional Organizations (CROP) which has emerged out of the initial DFG grant. CROP has been established to systematically compare regional organizations, to detect patterns of similarity between pairs of single agreements, and–following the development of a similarity index–to test theoretically derived hypotheses to the questions: What explains the similarity of the institutional designs of regional organizations? Does diffusion explain such similarities and if yes, which mechanisms of diffusion? The core of CROP is the generation of two datasets, CROPDA I on institutional design characteristics, and CROPDA II on explanatory and control variables, which allow us to measure and explain similarities among regional organizations with a diffusion oriented approach. These two datasets present unique efforts of data-collection on regional organizations. First descriptive analyses of CROPDA I have demonstrated that the similarity of regional organizations can be addressed in a differentiated, and empirically intuitive way: instead of defining the similarity of regional organizations as convergence measured by the aggregated similarity of agreements, we extract empirical models of regional organization through factor analysis on four dimensions: norms, policy areas, institutions and competences. This provides us with a measure of similarity that is, 1) data-driven, 2) more fine-grained than the aggregate level, and 3) provides us with conceptual leverage to generate a theoretical discussion on the measurement of regional organizations and the dimensions of such a measurement.The major objectives of the project are to establish the number and type of models among regional organizations, to conduct a number of statistical tests to validate these models, to generate higher-order-models, to explore how the different models hang together, and finally, to explain the models and their evolution over time and space themselves. As an outcome of the project, we will know how regional organizations have evolved over time and what determines this evolution. Practically speaking will we know whether regional organizations tend to develop from functional to political ones, and from Westphalian to liberal ones or whether they have their own developmental trajectories. We will additonally have contributed to the conceptual debate on the measurement of regional organizations in the field of comparative regionalism and comparative politics.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
France, USA
