Measuring the Topology of Complexity: Institutionalization, Clustering, and Centralization

Many policy domains are now governed by multiple international agreements and bodies that scholars refer to as regime, institutional, or governance complexes. However, the literature making sense of these complex systems of institutions or regimes has so far developed theory with reference only to single policy areas. Scholars have claimed that their insights can travel across policy domains, but we do not see any a priori reason to assume so. Our paper argues that a comparative perspective on both the statics and dynamics of regime complexity is an important next step in theory development, but that commensuration is first required. We propose a multidimensional conceptualization based on three structural dimensions: institutionalization, clustering, and centralization. We argue that these dimensions reflect many structural features referenced in contemporary scholarship, and that network analytic measures allow their measurement, in turn enabling a comparative research agenda. When used in conjunction, these measures can be applied to not only compare the topology of regime complexes across policy domains, but also across time. We illustrate these arguments by tracing the topological trajectories across time of regime complexes in four different policy domains: trade (international economics), fisheries and (fresh)water (international environment) and alliances (international security). We have chosen these policy domains as they handle different types of problems and resources. Alliances, for example, negotiate concessions in terms of scarce and expensive military hardware. Trade is primarily about negotiating commitments in terms of market access or mutual market liberalization and integration. Fisheries agreements concern the access to or allocation of common pool resources. Freshwater agreements involve local asymmetries in pollution or use of riparian resources. Agreements in each of these issue areas trigger different kinds of commitments from their members and are more or less exclusive. To investigate our argument, we concentrate on the post WWII period with the aim to highlight variation of regime complexes across different sub-periods in the last 60 years. Data comes from the Correlates of War Project, DESTA, and an extension to IEA and ECOLEX. We conclude by speculating that different problem structures and types of uncertainty prominent in each policy domain drive the different topology trajectories.