BITs, FTAs, DTTs, PTAs- a slew of acronyms pepper newspapers and academic articles alike, describing new agreements settled between two governments. Though this host of abbreviations appears to be an alphabet soup, each agreement installs rules or structures the way governments behave in the economic realm. Burgeoning theories describe the shift from government-centered relations to governance (Slaughter, 2010) providing the necessary fuel to counter long-standing hierarchy-based explanations for the structures of international systems (Kahler, 2009). Network theory helps fill this void and offers a starting point for describing the current economic governance regime. It takes cues from its applications in sociology, computer science, engineering, and international affairs, and provides a set of explanatory tools capable of parsing out the actors and interactions that form the global economic governance system (Hafner-Burton, Kahler, Montgomer, 2009; Maoz, 2010).
In three parts, this paper connects network theory to the economic governance regime created by the vast array of economic agreements. First, standing political economic approaches to the governance phenomenon are coupled with key insights from network theory to identify areas where a network-based approach can improve understanding the changing economic governance landscape. Second, the principals and methodological tools of Social Network Analysis (SNA) are translated to the economic governance issues-area; data on investment, taxation, and trade agreements are employed to pair theory and to create a mapping of states and the myriad of agreements that form the basis for interlinked relationships. The third section explores (governance) networks as compelling dependent and independent variables for analysis, proposing a research agenda for vetting each type of variable. Together, the paper attempts to depict the structure of the international economic governance network, laying a foundation for future endeavors into quantitatively measuring the system of networked economic governance.
