How do states resolve jurisdictional conflicts among international institutions? In many issue areas, global governance is increasingly fragmented among multiple international organizations (IOs). Existing work argues this fragmentation can undermine cooperation as different institutions adopt conflicting rules. However, this perspective overlooks the potential for interinstitutional coordination. I develop a theory ofinstitutional deference: the acceptance of another IO's exercise of authority. By accepting rules crafted in another IO, member states can mitigate rule conflict and facilitate a division of labor within the regime complex. I use an original data set of over 2,000 IO policy documents to describe patterns of deference in the counterterrorism, intellectual property, and election-monitoring regime complexes. Empirical tests support two theoretical claims. First, institutional deference is indeed associated with a division of labor among institutions: IOs that defer to each other are more likely to focus their rule-making efforts on separate subissues. Second, deference is a strategic act that is shaped both by efficiency concerns and power politics. Statistical tests confirm that deference is used to efficiently pool resources among disparate organizations, and that IOs with weaker member states tend to defer to organizations with more powerful members.
Why do states build new international organizations (IOs) in issue areas where many institutions already exist? Prevailing theories of institutional creation emphasize their ability to resolve market failures, but adding new IOs can increase uncertainty and rule inconsistency. I argue that institutional proliferation occurs when existing IOs fail to adapt to shifts in state power. Member states expect decision-making rules to reflect their underlying power; when it does not, they demand greater influence in the organization. Subsequent bargaining over the redistribution of IO influence often fails due to credibility and information problems. As a result, under-represented states construct new organizations that provide them with greater institutional control. To test this argument, I examine the proliferation of multilateral development banks since 1944. I leverage a novel identification strategy rooted in the allocation of World Bank votes at Bretton Woods to show that the probability of institutional proliferation is higher when power is misaligned in existing institutions. My results suggest that conflict over shifts in global power contribute to the fragmentation of global governance.
A primary goal of social science research is to understand how latent group memberships predict the dynamic process of network evolution. In the modeling of international conflicts, for example, scholars hypothesize that membership in geopolitical coalitions shapes the decision to engage in militarized conflict. Such theories explain the ways in which nodal and dyadic characteristics affect the evolution of relational ties over time via their effects on group memberships. To aid the empirical testing of these arguments, we develop a dynamic model of network data by combining a hidden Markov model with a mixed-membership stochastic blockmodel that identifies latent groups underlying the network structure. Unlike existing models, we incorporate covariates that predict node membership in latent groups as well as the direct formation of edges between dyads. While prior substantive research often assumes the decision to engage in militarized conflict is independent across states and static over time, we demonstrate that conflict patterns are driven by states' evolving membership in geopolitical blocs. Changes in monadic covariates like democracy shift states between coalitions, generating heterogeneous effects on conflict over time and across states. The proposed methodology, which relies on a variational approximation to a collapsed posterior distribution as well as stochastic optimization for scalability, is implemented through an open-source software package.
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