How similar are the institutional designs of regional organizations (ROs)? Is there a trend toward particular designs such as the European Union's, or is there greater institutional variety as more regions have created an increasing number of ROs? Which designs have spread through the system, and which remain idiosyncratic? To answer these questions, the Comparative Regional Organizations Project has assembled the most detailed dataset on ROs to date, with more than 80 organizations and their 276 founding and amending treaties being coded on more than 300 institutional design features. From these data, the project has generated the Regional Organizations Similarity Index (ROSI), a dyadic measure of the similarity between any two ROs at various points during their existence. We outline the rationale for ROSI and detail its construction, and show that it captures previously unstudied patterns of variation in the RO universe across time and space. In addition to generalizations about the case universe, ROSI allows us to estimate which institutional designs constitute deviations and which tend to follow established models. We demonstrate the validity of ROSI with the help of brief case studies exploring which institutional design features led to the identified scores.
Why do states design regional organizations with courts and parliaments? Is it indeed the case that states establish them because they expect these organs to exert some kind of democratic control over executives? Undoubtedly, this is an important question given that politicians and political scientists alike regularly lament the lack of democratic control of many international organizations. We tackle this question empirically. Based on an original data set of 72 regional organizations and by using simple logistic and ordinal logistic regression analyses, this article tests for the association between domestic regime type and the existence of regional courts and parliaments. These organs were selected because they are associated with dimensions of democracy, namely constitutionality and inclusiveness. The most consistent correlates of the existence of each of these institutional bodies and the aggregate of them are functional ones: policy scope, trade-related variables, and conflict-related variables. There is no significant association between any measure of democracy and the existence of these institutions. These results are discussed the context of debates about the democratic deficit of international and regional organizations and the question of whether democratic standards are applicable to regional organizations.
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