Checks and Balances Beyond the State: Comparing International Institutional Configurations Over Time

The comparative quantitative research on formal international organizations (IOs) has proliferated significantly during recent years. Most of the current studies focus on specific governance dimensions as their crucial point of comparison (e.g. Zürn 2018 on the binding nature of decisions, Hooghe et al 2017 on pooling and delegation, Goertz and Powers 2014 on issue areas, Tallberg et al 2013 on transnational access). As this new branch of IO research is necessarily situated at the interface between International Relations and Comparative Politics, the next steps in comparing IOs need to link both perspectives more rigorously. Therefore, this paper employs a novel approach to the comparison of IOs by focusing on the configuration of formal institutional bodies that take part in the decision-making process within different IOs. Specifically, the relationships between institutional bodies as indicated by their competences during the policy-making and policy-implementing process are analyzed and subsequently put into relation with those of other IOs. Building on a new dataset developed by the Comparative Regional Organizations Project (Jetschke et al 2018), in conjunction with the MIA dataset (Hooghe et al 2017), 75 regional IOs are compared with regard to their institutional configurations over time. The theoretical approach developed in this paper draws on classical comparative government literature (e.g. Du Vernay 1965, Almond and Powell 1978, Sartori 1994, Lijphart 1999), thus transferring the established schemes for analyzing executive-legislative relationships between governmental bodies on the national level to the analysis of institutional configurations of IOs. In addition to this theoretical innovation, the paper demonstrates how institutional configurations become thicker and more entangled over time, in terms of increased numbers of institutional bodies within IOs and by increased formal legislative and executive competences of these bodies. Using cluster analytic methods, the analysis results in a typology of three distinct empirical types of IOs.