TY - JOUR

T1 - Institutional Pioneers in World Politics

T2 - Regional Institution Building and the Influence of the European Union

AU - Lenz, Tobias

AU - Burilkov, Alexandr

N1 - Funding Information: Earlier versions of this article were presented at the International Studies Conference in New Orleans, February 2015, the German Political Science Association Conference, September 2015, and at seminars or workshops at Oxford University, the European University Institute and the Social Science Research Centre Berlin. We thank the participants at these events, and especially Carlos Closa, Dan Drezner, Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt, Liesbet Hooghe, Joe Jupille, Hanspeter Kriesi, David Lake, Miklos Lazar, Mikael Madsen, Gary Marks, Walter Mattli, Olivia Nicol, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Philippe Schmitter, Gerald Schneider, Jack Seddon, Duncan Snidal, Sören Stapel, Jonas Tallberg, Erik Voeten, Konstantin Vössing and Michael Zürn, as well as the editors and reviewers for comments. We also thank Lennard Alke, Pia Noethlichs and Antonia Schlude for excellent research assistance. Tobias Lenz acknowledges support from the European Research Council Advanced Grant #249543 ‘Causes and Consequences of Multilevel Governance’, and a Daimlerand-Benz Foundation postdoctoral scholarship. Publisher Copyright: © 2016, © The Author(s) 2016.

PY - 2017/9/1

Y1 - 2017/9/1

N2 - What drives processes of institution building within regional international organizations? We challenge those established theories of regionalism, and of institutionalized cooperation more broadly, that treat different organizations as independent phenomena whose evolution is conditioned primarily by internal causal factors. Developing the basic premise of ‘diffusion theory’ — meaning that decision-making is interdependent across organizations — we argue that institutional pioneers, and specifically the European Union, shape regional institution-building processes in a number of discernible ways. We then hypothesize two pathways — active and passive — of European Union influence, and stipulate an endogenous capacity for institutional change as a key scope condition for their operation. Drawing on a new and original data set on the institutional design of 34 regional international organizations in the period from 1950 to 2010, the article finds that: (1) both the intensity of a regional international organization’s structured interaction with the European Union (active influence) and the European Union’s own level of delegation (passive influence) are associated with higher levels of delegation within other regional international organizations; (2) passive European Union influence exerts a larger overall substantive effect than active European Union influence does; and (3) these effects are strongest among those regional international organizations that are based on founding contracts containing open-ended commitments. These findings indicate that the creation and subsequent institutional evolution of the European Union has made a difference to the evolution of institutions in regional international organizations elsewhere, thereby suggesting that existing theories of regionalism are insufficiently able to account for processes of institution building in such contexts.

AB - What drives processes of institution building within regional international organizations? We challenge those established theories of regionalism, and of institutionalized cooperation more broadly, that treat different organizations as independent phenomena whose evolution is conditioned primarily by internal causal factors. Developing the basic premise of ‘diffusion theory’ — meaning that decision-making is interdependent across organizations — we argue that institutional pioneers, and specifically the European Union, shape regional institution-building processes in a number of discernible ways. We then hypothesize two pathways — active and passive — of European Union influence, and stipulate an endogenous capacity for institutional change as a key scope condition for their operation. Drawing on a new and original data set on the institutional design of 34 regional international organizations in the period from 1950 to 2010, the article finds that: (1) both the intensity of a regional international organization’s structured interaction with the European Union (active influence) and the European Union’s own level of delegation (passive influence) are associated with higher levels of delegation within other regional international organizations; (2) passive European Union influence exerts a larger overall substantive effect than active European Union influence does; and (3) these effects are strongest among those regional international organizations that are based on founding contracts containing open-ended commitments. These findings indicate that the creation and subsequent institutional evolution of the European Union has made a difference to the evolution of institutions in regional international organizations elsewhere, thereby suggesting that existing theories of regionalism are insufficiently able to account for processes of institution building in such contexts.

KW - Delegation

KW - diffusion

KW - institutional change

KW - institutional design

KW - regional international organizations

KW - regionalism

KW - Politics

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85026856300&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1177/1354066116674261

DO - 10.1177/1354066116674261

M3 - Journal articles

C2 - 29400350

AN - SCOPUS:85026856300

VL - 23

SP - 654

EP - 680

JO - European Journal of International Relations

JF - European Journal of International Relations

SN - 1354-0661

IS - 3

ER -