How and under what conditions does legitimacy affect processes of international institutional change? This article specifies and evaluates three causal mechanisms by which variation in legitimacy induces institutional change in international organizations (IOs) and argues that an important, yet hitherto neglected, source of legitimacy-based change is cognitive in nature. Using survival analysis, we evaluate these mechanisms with a novel dataset on the establishment of parliamentary institutions in thirty-six regional organizations between 1950 and 2010. We find that the empowerment of supranational secretariats, engagement with the European Union, and parliamentarization in an organization’s neighborhood increase the likelihood of regional parliamentarization. This suggests that legitimacy judgments that draw on cognitive referents provide an important source of international institutional change. We illustrate the underlying cognitive emulation mechanism with a case study of parliamentarization in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

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合法性与国际制度变迁的认知源：区域议会化案例

合法性如何以及在什么条件下影响国际制度变革的进程？本文指定并评估了三种因果关系机制，合法性的变化通过这些因果机制引起国际组织（IOs）的制度变化，并认为基于合法性的变化的一个重要但至今仍被忽视的本质是认知。使用生存分析，我们使用新颖的数据集评估了这些机制，这些数据集用于1950年至2010年期间在36个区域组织中建立议会机构。我们发现，赋予超国家秘书处权力，与欧洲联盟互动以及在组织邻里实行议会化增加地区议会化的可能性。这表明，基于认知对象的合法性判断提供了国际制度变革的重要来源。我们以东南亚国家联盟的议会化案例研究为例，说明了潜在的认知模仿机制。