Measuring institutional overlap in global governance

Abstract

Over the past decade, an increasingly sophisticated literature has sought to capture the nature, sources, and consequences of a novel empirical phenomenon in world politics: the growing complexity of global governance. However, this literature has paid only limited attention to questions of measurement, which is a prerequisite for a more comprehensive understanding of global governance complexity across space and time. In taking a first step in this direction, we make two contributions in the article. First, we propose new quantitative measures that gauge the extent of complexity in global governance, which we conceptualize as the degree to which global governance institutions overlap. Dyadic, weighted, directed-dyadic, and monadic measures enable a multifaceted understanding of this important development in world politics. Second, we illustrate these measures by applying them to an updated version of the most comprehensive data set on the design of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs): the Measure of International Authority (MIA). This allows us to identify cross-sectional and temporal patterns in the extent to which important IGOs, which tend to form the core of sprawling regime complexes in many issue areas, overlap. We conclude by outlining notable implications for, and potential applications of, our measures for research on institutional design and evolution, legitimacy, and legitimation, as well as effectiveness and performance. This discussion underscores the utility of the proposed measures, as both dependent and independent variables, to researchers examining the sources and consequences of institutional overlap in global governance and beyond.

The global governance complexity cube: Varieties of institutional complexity in global governance

“…7 A good starting point for gauging the density of interactions in GGCs is to consider the degree of overlap in institutional mandates, functions and memberships. In turn, this can be measured at the level of specific clusters of institutions or at the level of a complex as a whole (Haftel & Lenz, 2022;Reinsberg & Westerwinter, 2021a;Westerwinter, 2021a). In addition to overlap in functions or memberships, other types of connections may also be of interest, such as shared sources of funding, joint programmatic activities or sharing of personnel.…”

“…Importantly, the thickness of different types of institutional ties may vary independently. For example, some institutions may overlap widely in memberships but narrowly in terms of functions, or vice-versa (Haftel & Lenz, 2022;Reinsberg & Westerwinter, 2021a). The same institutions may draw on similar sources of funding, while using expertise from separate expert communities.…”

“…Given growing overlap between institutions of global governance, such measures may be too simplistic. Rather than a binary concept, institutional overlap is a question of degree and may take different forms (Haftel & Lenz, 2022;Reinsberg & Westerwinter, 2021a).…”

“…Nevertheless, we acknowledge that governments and IGOs often play a central role in GGCs (Haftel & Lenz, 2022;Kahler, 2021).…”

Interorganizational Diffusion in International Relations

“…Understanding the complex politics of diffusion in International Relations is of growing importance because the relevance of diffusion as a factor shaping internation al institutional design is bound to increase. Due to the growing complexity of the global governance architecture and growth in the overlap of international institutions (Alter and Raustalia 2018;Haftel and Lenz 2021), interactions between organizations will multiply, and this provides fertile ground for the diffusion of institutional and policy models. Recent research shows that connectivity between IOs facilitates diffusion, and may even lead to institutional convergence (Sommerer and Tallberg 2019).…”