Separation of Powers Beyond the State? Comparing Institutional Configurations Within IOs

The comparative research on international organizations (IOs) has proliferated significantly during recent years. Many current studies focus on specific governance dimensions as their crucial point of comparison. 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 develops a theoretical framework that aims at the comparison of separation of powers within IOs focusing on the configurations of formal institutional bodies that take part in the decision-making process within 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. Employing an original dataset based on the Comparative Regional Organizations Project (CROP), 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, 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. Empirically, the paper demonstrates how institutional configurations become generally thicker over time, in terms of increased numbers of institutional bodies within IOs and by increased formal legislative and executive competences of these bodies. The paper concludes with the introduction of an empirical classification of IOs regarding different degrees of power separation.