The Distribution of Legislative Powers within Regional Organizations: Does Regime Type Matter?

Research on the relationship between regional organizations (ROs) and democratization has already established knowledge about the motives of democratizing states to join regional organizations in the first place (Mansfield and Pevehouse 2008). In addition, the reasons for the establishment of certain institutions within regional organizations can be found in democratizing states` interests in increasing the accountability of regional governance by establishing regional parliaments (Jancic 2019), regional courts (Moravcsik 1995) or democracy clauses (Closa and Palestini 2018). At the same time, regional organizations are far from being exclusive institutions to democracies or democratizing states. One of the oldest ROs, the League of Arab States, consists mainly of autocratic member states. But also newer ROs, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) or the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) have members that are autocratizing rather than democratizing. In this vein, a strand of recent research finds that autocracies deliberately use ROs to promote their geopolitical interests (Kneuer et al. 2018) or to rely on their membership in autocratic ROs as a means for regime survival (Debre 2021). Apparently, being a member in a regional organization does not necessarily indicate the status of a country as a democracy, an autocracy or anything in between. Other than that, it seems that all types of regimes can find fitting peer groups among ROs to further their respective interests. Building on these insights, this paper investigates the question whether there are differences in the institutional design of ROs with regard to the regime types that shape them. Specifically, the paper looks at the distribution of legislative powers in the decision-making process within ROs. Following the assumption about the externalization of domestic democratic principles to the international level (Tallberg et al. 2016; Heldt and Schmittke 2019), it should be expected that ROs with predominantly democratic memberships are more likely to distribute legislative powers across several collective actors within their organization or tend to establish institutional veto-players (Tsebelis 2002) such as supranational courts, as the distribution of legislative powers has a long constitutional tradition among democracies. To investigate this hypothesis, the paper analyses the formal distribution of legislative powers within 75 ROs and shows that there are at least three different types of ROs with regard to the degree of power distribution. In some cases, the power to draft and to decide upon legislative acts is concentrated to one organ, in other cases there are at least two organs that share legislative competencies and in some few cases, legislation is distributed among two or more organs and additionally controlled by further organs. The subsequent analysis tests whether higher degrees of legislative power distribution can be explained by different memberships with regard to regime types in order to answer the question whether it makes a difference for RO designs if they are established by democracies or autocracies.