IR Workshop – Brandon Kinne, UC Davis

DateApril 17, 2017

Time3:00pm to 4:30pm

Location
4357 Bunche Hall 

Contact

Abstract:Why do states join international organizations (IOs)? Cooperation theory offers a number of plausible answers to this question. However, empirical analysis of IOs has not kept pace with theory. We identify three key limitations in existing empirical research on IO membership. First, the units of analysis commonly used to model membership, such as the country-year or dyad-year, do not sufficiently distinguish between the attributes of states and the attributes of IOs. Not only do states select IOs, but IOs also select states, which necessitates careful attention to the attributes of each. Second, empirical models generally ignore the “match quality” between countries and IOs, implicitly assuming that all IOs are equally accessible to all countries. In practice, many IOs are functionally off-limits to large numbers of states, while others attract only certain types of states. Third, although cooperation theorists have long argued that IO membership is partially influenced by social effects, where the IO memberships of some states influence the memberships of others, few empirical models incorporate social effects into the analysis. We address these limitations by modeling IO membership as a dynamic affiliation network. Using newly collected data at the state-IO level, we build an inferential network model that addresses all three of the above limitations. The analysis shows that state-IO match quality and social effects are, by far, the primary determinants of IO membership. 

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