Mapping Economic and Political Characteristics of International Organizations: a New Dataset.

International Organizations (IOs) have experienced a significant growth in the last decades in terms of quantity, membership, and diversity. Such increase has paved the way to the production of a substantial range of comparative measures that serve as basis to go beyond existing case studies. They aimed to describe and quantify different features of the empirical substance produced by IOs. Example of this are the Measure of International Authority dataset and International Organization dataset. The former accounts for several institutional characteristics of the organizations whereas the later registers more general features, such as the status or the membership of the organizations. What still remains unexplored from a comparative perspective is the link between the IOs and the characteristics and relationships of the states that form them. This paper aims to construct new empirical measures that help studying the IOs and the fields of regionalism and interregionalism. It does so by bringing a new focus that emerge from regionalism literature and broad international relations literature. This permits to produce measurements that have not been operationalized to date for quantitative purposes in the field of IOs such as the political, economic, and cultural homogeneity of its members as well as the distribution of capabilities across the territorial limits of each organization. The new measurements encompass a timeline from 1945 onwards and aim to contribute empirically to further research on different issues such as the patterns of IOs’ institutional evolution or the involvement of the member states in IOs’ institutional processes.