Speaker: Tobias Martin Josef Lenz (EUI)

Academic Coordinator: Carlos Closa Montero (EUI)

What drives processes of institution building in regional international organizations? An emerging literature on diffusion challenges established theories of regionalism and of institutionalized cooperation more broadly that treat different organizations as independent phenomena whose emergence and evolution is conditioned primarily by internal causal factors. Drawing on the basic premise of diffusion theory that decision-making is interdependent across organizations, we argue that institutional vanguards, specifically the European Union, impact regional institution building processes in discernible ways. We hypothesize two pathways of EU influence – active and passive – and stipulate a key scope condition for their operation. Drawing on a new and original dataset on the institutional design of 34 regional international organizations in the period from 1950 to 2010, we find support for the idea that active EU support through structured interaction is associated with higher levels of delegation, whereas the EU’s own level of delegation (passive influence) exerts an impact only in RIOs that have a relatively incomplete founding contract. These results bolster the basic premise of diffusion theory that interdependence between RIOs impacts their institutional evolution, but also suggest that organizational characteristics provide an important scope condition, especially for indirect diffusion influences.

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