Abstract

How similar are the institutional designs of regional organizations (ROs)? Is there a trend toward particular designs such as the European Union's, or is there greater institutional variety as more regions have created an increasing number of ROs? Which designs have spread through the system, and which remain idiosyncratic? To answer these questions, the Comparative Regional Organizations Project has assembled the most detailed dataset on ROs to date, with more than 80 organizations and their 276 founding and amending treaties being coded on more than 300 institutional design features. From these data, the project has generated the Regional Organizations Similarity Index (ROSI), a dyadic measure of the similarity between any two ROs at various points during their existence. We outline the rationale for ROSI and detail its construction, and show that it captures previously unstudied patterns of variation in the RO universe across time and space. In addition to generalizations about the case universe, ROSI allows us to estimate which institutional designs constitute deviations and which tend to follow established models. We demonstrate the validity of ROSI with the help of brief case studies exploring which institutional design features led to the identified scores.

中文翻译：

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区域组织设计中（非）相似性的模式：区域组织相似性指数（ROSI）

摘要

区域组织（RO）的机构设计有多相似？是否有针对特定设计（例如欧盟）的趋势，还是随着更多地区创建了越来越多的认可组织而增加了机构种类吗？哪些设计已在系统中传播，哪些保持特质？为了回答这些问题，“比较区域组织项目”收集了迄今为止最详细的RO数据集，其中有80多个组织及其276项创始和修正条约均以300多种机构设计特征进行编码。根据这些数据，该项目生成了区域组织相似性指数（ROSI），这是对两个RO在其存在期间各个时间点之间相似性的直接量度。我们概述了ROSI的基本原理，并详细说明了其构建方式，并显示了它捕获了RO宇宙在时间和空间上先前未被研究的变化模式。除了对案例宇宙的概括之外，ROSI还使我们能够估计哪些机构设计构成偏差，哪些机构设计趋于遵循既定模型。我们借助简短的案例研究证明了ROSI的有效性，该案例研究探讨了哪些机构设计特征导致了所确定的分数。