In this article, we aim to contribute to two contemporary debates within the English School. The debate about how to observe primary institutions and the debate concerning hierarchy between primary institutions. Specifically, we analyse references to primary institutions in United Nations General Assembly disarmament resolutions in the decade 1989–1998 and their distribution using descriptive statistics. In this way, the article offers a novel approach to identifying primary institutions empirically, and provides some insight into the hierarchy-question in the sense of documenting the relative numerical presence of references to different primary institutions in a specific issue area and temporal context. With respect to the latter, the key finding is that great power management, diplomacy and international law are by far the most prominent primary institutions in the analysed material. This is an intriguing finding, not least given the importance attached to them by Hedley Bull in his classic work The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. The main contribution of the article is thus to spell out a new approach to how the aforementioned debates might proceed empirically.

在本文中，我们旨在为英语学校内的两个当代辩论做出贡献。关于如何遵守初级机构的辩论以及有关初级机构之间等级制度的辩论。具体而言，我们使用描述性统计数据分析了联合国大会1989-1998年十年裁军决议中对主要机构的提及及其分布。这样，本文提供了一种从经验上识别主要机构的新颖方法，并且在记录特定问题领域和时间上下文中对不同主要机构的引用的相对数字存在的意义上，提供了对层次结构问题的一些见解。关于后者，关键发现是出色的电源管理，迄今为止，外交和国际法是所分析材料中最突出的主要机构。这是一个有趣的发现，尤其是考虑到赫德利·布尔（Hedley Bull）在经典作品中对它们的重视无政府主义社会：世界政治秩序研究。因此，本文的主要贡献在于阐明一种新方法，以解决上述辩论如何凭经验进行的问题。