International Parliamentary Institutions: Patterns of International Parliamentary Organizing

The past three decades witnessed a remarkable spread of International Parliamentary Institutions (IPIs), especially on the transnational regional level. Today, almost every major regional international organization (IO) incorporates an assembly of some either directly or indirectly elected parliamentarians, however with strong variation across functions, powers, and design. Yet, two distinguished features mark the unique organizational quality of every IPI compared to other types of IOs: the linkage between local, sub-national constituencies and the international and regional level on the one hand as well as an inherent parliamentary quality of organizing on the other. This paper argues that an organizational understanding of IPIs conceptualizing these two features helps the literature to capture and contextualize the variation in organizational powers, function, and design across types of IPIs and regions. The study develops a typology of International Parliamentary Institutions theorizing the specific organizational quality of each type. Based on an original dataset of 68 (mostly regional) IPIs, an empirical analysis maps and compares patterns of some organizational design features. These findings provide a profound theoretical framework and new empirical data that helps to structure the scholarly debate on the functions and effects of parliamentary politics in IOs and provides some avenues for future research.