Not all international institutions are created equal: their design, not to mention efficacy and legitimacy, varies considerably. Much of the current ‘rational design of international institutions’ literature looks at institutional design to explain the peculiar popularity of particular institutions for states and thus political interaction. This literature engages with a state’s choice to affiliate with a particular institution as if it were a choice made independently of the structure of pre-existing affiliations. But international institutions are not created or maintained independently. Institutional complexity literatures recognise that the modern map of international institutions overlaps and interconnects around particular issue areas. States sign and ratify treaties and join institutions with considerable knowledge of the pre-existing structural context and the structural implications of their decisions.
This paper deploys statistical network models (i.e. stochastic actor-oriented models and multilevel exponential random graph models) to investigate the relationship between institutional design and state-institution affiliation structure in the context of the international fisheries institutional complex. It reconstructs the evolution of this structure by modelling variations in institutional design across five categories and state nodal attributes with structural dependencies. The conclusion discusses concurrent and potential extensions.
