Tobias Lenz

Leuphana University of Lüneburg

In the post-World War Two era, regional organizations have proliferated. The accompanying literature focuses on analysing the drivers and effects of regionalism, but has, to date, largely neglected a series of puzzling macro-phenomena: the marked spatial and temporal clustering of regional organizations, as well as similarities in their institution...

The ideational impact captured by Manners’s notion of normative power Europe (NPE) appears most distinct and potentially most consequential in the realm of regionalism. However, empirical research on the topic has been hampered by the focus on EU actorness and methodological difficulties. Drawing on diffusion theory, this article develops conceptua...

This paper addresses the EU's influence on the design of market-building objectives and dispute settlement mechanisms in Mercosur and SADC over time. It argues that such influence has had an independent effect on the evolution of regional institutional design that is not reducible to mere functional dynamics, which dominant explanations emphasize....

Recent decades have seen an intensification of international organizations’ (IOs) attempts to justify their authority. The existing research suggests that IO representatives have scaled up self-legitimation to defend their organizations’ legitimacy in light of public criticism. In contrast, this article demonstrates that IOs intensify self-legitima...

This article introduces a new dataset on how international organizations (IOs) justify their authority. For a long time, IOs were believed to derive legitimacy from member-state consent and technocratic problem-solving capacities. Over recent decades, the growing politicization of IOs, political polarization within Western democracies, and power sh...

In the face of public contestation, international organizations (IOs) invoke norms in their public communication to enhance relevant audiences' legitimacy beliefs. This article offers the first comprehensive analysis of what we term normative diversity in IOs' discursive legitimation by drawing on a novel dataset on norm-based justifications in mor...

How do international organizations (IOs) claim legitimacy, and why do they do so in different ways? Confronted with contestation and critique, IOs seek to enhance audiences' beliefs in their legitimacy by justifying their governance competence through public communication and the change of institutions and behaviour. This article serves as an intro...

Unlabelled: Why do some international organizations (IO) accrete delegated authority over time while in others delegation is static or declines? We hypothesize that the dynamics of delegation are shaped by an IO's founding contract. IOs rooted in an open-ended contract have the capacity to discover cooperation over time: as new problems arise thes...

This chapter surveys theories of regionalism and proposes a research agenda to study regionalism in a more inclusive and pluralistic fashion. We argue that much of the theorizing on regionalism is either implicitly or explicitly based on the European integration experience (EU-centrism) or is deductively derived from general International Relations...

How and with what effects do institutions diffuse between international organizations (IOs)? An emerging literature extends a key insight of the study of diffusion processes among states to the international level, establishing that the adoption of institutions in IOs is regularly conditioned by the choices of other IOs. Yet, this literature neglec...

How do international organisations (IOs) legitimise their right to rule in times of a Pandemic? Where are their previously made environmental commitments on their agenda during a crisis? What are the differences in self-legitimation, if any, across different types of IOs? These questions have gathered renewed urgency during the ongoing COVID-19 and...

This chapter examines the European Union’s influence on other regional organizations through a statistical analysis of a dataset that contains information on the institutionalization of 36 regional organizations from 1950, or the year of their establishment, until 2017. The analysis shows that both the intensity of a regional organization’s engagem...

How and under what conditions does the European Union (EU) shape processes of institution building in other regional organizations? Interorganizational Diffusion in International Relations: Regional Institutions and the Role of the European Union develops and tests a theory of interorganizational diffusion in international relations that explains h...

How and under what conditions does the European Union (EU) shape processes of institution building in other regional organizations? This book develops and tests a theory of interorganizational diffusion in international relations that explains how successful pioneer organizations shape institutional choices in other organizations by affecting the i...

How and under what conditions does the European Union (EU) shape processes of institution building in other regional organizations? This book develops and tests a theory of interorganizational diffusion in international relations that explains how successful pioneer organizations shape institutional choices in other organizations by affecting the i...

How and under what conditions does the European Union (EU) shape processes of institution building in other regional organizations? This book develops and tests a theory of interorganizational diffusion in international relations that explains how successful pioneer organizations shape institutional choices in other organizations by affecting the i...

Over the past decade, an increasingly sophisticated literature has sought to capture the nature, sources, and consequences of a novel empirical phenomenon in world politics: the growing complexity of global governance. However, this literature has paid only limited attention to questions of measurement, which is a prerequisite for a more comprehens...

Over the past decade, an increasingly sophisticated literature has sought to capture the nature, sources, and consequences of a novel empirical phenomenon in world politics: the growing complexity of global governance institutions. However, this literature has paid only limited attention to questions of measurement, which is a prerequisite for a mo...

International parliaments are on the rise. An increasing number of international organizations establishes 'international parliamentary institutions' or IPIs, which bring together members of national parliaments or - in rare cases - elected representatives of member state citizens. Yet, IPIs have generally remained powerless institutions with at be...

The East African Community (EAC) was established in 1967, abolished ten years later, and re-established in 1999. In both cases, it included an international parliamentary institution, the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA). EALA is remarkable for its far-reaching legislative competencies. The EALA is best explained by a combination of diffusi...

International parliamentary institutions (IPIs) are on the rise. Around the world, international organizations have increasingly established or affiliated parliamentary assemblies. At the same time, IPIs have generally remained powerless institutions with at best a consultative role in the decision-making process of international organizations. Thi...

This chapter analyses international parliamentarization in the Andean region. Andean integration has seen, first, the creation of the Andean Pact without an international parliamentary institution (IPI) in 1969, followed by the establishment of the Andean Parliament in 1979 and a slight IPI empowerment in conjunction with the foundation of the Ande...

This chapter examines the evolution of the parliamentary dimension in Mercosur, from its modest beginnings with the Joint Parliamentary Commission to the establishment of the consultative Mercosur Parliament (Parlasur) in 2005. The context for the establishment and empowerment of an international parliamentary institution was favourable in Mercosur...

In this chapter, we provide statistical analyses of the establishment and empowerment of international parliamentary institutions (IPIs) in seventy-three relevant international organizations. We analyse whether IPI establishment was systematically associated with the conditions of parliamentarization and find robust and strong positive associations...

This chapter examines the international parliamentarization of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). ECOWAS was founded in 1975 without an international parliamentary institution (IPI). An IPI was only created in 1993 in the context of general treaty reform. In particular, the democratization process in the region, the promotion o...

This chapter presents a case study of the NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA is a case of ‘non-parliamentarization’ in a democratic, albeit task-specific organization with low authority, and narrow scope created after a momentous governance success—the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union—in a regional environment...

This chapter examines two Eurasian international organizations in comparison, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the more recent Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), a project of more advanced economic integration. It starts with the puzzling observation that the CIS established an IPI, whereas the EAEU did not, in spite of higher authorit...

This chapter describes the universe of international parliamentary institutions (IPIs): their attributes, their historical development, their regional variation and their organizational features. It shows that, while the first IPI dates from the nineteenth century, IPIs have only emerged in larger numbers after World War II and in particular during...

This chapter presents the results of a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of the case studies on the establishment and empowerment of international parliamentary institutions by international organizations. The analysis looks for patterns in the necessary and sufficient conditions of international parliamentarization as well as for distinct and...

This chapter analyses the reasons why governments rejected a formal recognition of the ASEAN Interparliamentary Organization/Assembly for a long time, but finally established an official affiliation during the Charter-making process in 2008/10. Until today, ASEAN provides a comparatively unfavourable context for parliamentarization because the orga...

The chapter analyses the development of the European Parliament (EP) since the European Coal and Steel Community (1952). Specifically, it includes the establishment of an international parliamentary institution (IPI) in 1952, the initial creation of legislative powers in the Single European Act (1986), the renegotiation of legislative powers ahead...

This chapter examines the parliamentarization of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The establishment of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly took place in the context of the post-Cold War democratization wave in Eastern Europe and the active diffusion efforts of the Council of Europe. Whereas the Western governments had a...

This chapter introduces the case studies. It describes the rationale for studying cases, our case selection, and the structure of the case study chapters. The case studies offer an opportunity to examine the conditions under which international organizations establish international parliamentary institutions (IPIs) in more detail, take into account...

This chapter concludes the book and presents its key findings and takeaways. It reiterates the argument of strategic legitimation in international organizations: that governments establish international parliamentary institutions to pay tribute to global norms of democratic governance and legitimate international organizations that have become both...

This chapter lays out the theoretical framework for the study of international parliamentary institutions (IPIs). First, it argues that IPIs display few of the functional benefits that are commonly associated with the delegation of competences to international institutions. Second, it claims that the assumption of normatively committed member state...

This chapter presents a case study of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). It examines why the PIF has never established an international parliamentary institution (IPI) in spite of several favourable conditions, such as an increase in authority, a large scope, predominantly democratic member states, a legitimacy crisis in regional governance, and impr...

International parliamentary institutions (IPIs) are on the rise. Around the world, international organizations have increasingly established or affiliated parliamentary assemblies. At the same time, IPIs have generally remained powerless institutions with at best a consultative role in the decision-making process of international organizations. Thi...

International parliamentary institutions (IPIs) are on the rise. Around the world, international organizations have increasingly established or affiliated parliamentary assemblies. At the same time, IPIs have generally remained powerless institutions with at best a consultative role in the decision-making process of international organizations. Thi...

International parliamentary institutions (IPIs) are on the rise. Around the world, international organizations have increasingly established or affiliated parliamentary assemblies. At the same time, IPIs have generally remained powerless institutions with at best a consultative role in the decision-making process of international organizations. Thi...

International parliamentary institutions (IPIs) are on the rise. Around the world, international organizations have increasingly established or affiliated parliamentary assemblies. At the same time, IPIs have generally remained powerless institutions with at best a consultative role in the decision-making process of international organizations. Thi...

This article argues that the chief challenge to international governance is an emerging political cleavage, which pits nationalists against immigration, free trade, and international authority. While those on the radical left contest international governance for its limits, nationalists reject it in principle. A wide-ranging cultural and economic r...

The paper critically appraises the idea, both descriptively and normatively, that the Euro-pean Union (EU) system can and should serve as a model for governance beyond its own borders. Engaging the postcolonial literature, it proposes a critical analysis of the idea, discourse and practice of Europe-as-a-model. We argue for a problematization of th...

Chapter 8 summarizes the argument of the book in five theses: IO governance has both a formal and an informal basis; its foundation is contractual; and sociality and politicization alongside functionality explain how IOs are structured and how they make decisions. The possibilities for governance in the international domain appear to be circumscrib...

Chapter 6 explains change in pooling and delegating authority to an IO. An IO’s authority is responsive to two pressures, one functional and one social. Functional pressures stem from the need to make decision making tractable under an expanding policy portfolio. This induces an IO’s member states to pool authority in majoritarian decision making a...

Chapter 2 lays out the hard core of a postfunctionalist theory of international organization. The point of departure is to conceive governance as a social contract among rational actors to escape anarchy. It refines social contract theory by assuming that a contract for governance can concentrate authority or disperse it across territorial scales b...

This book explains the design and development of international organization in the postwar period. It theorizes that the basic set up of an IO responds to two forces: the functional impetus to tackle problems that spill beyond national borders and a desire for self-rule that can dampen cooperation where transnational community is thin. The book rev...

Chapter 4 explains the basic set-up of an IO—its membership, contract, and policy portfolio. It conceives the basic set-up as resulting from the tension between the functional benefits of providing public goods at an international scale and the preference of exclusive communities for self-rule. The theory expects international organization to be bi...

Chapter 5 explains change in an IO’s policy portfolio. The model is in two steps. In a first step, the extent to which an IO is grounded on an incomplete contract determines its responsiveness to exogenous shocks. Second and causally prior to this, contractual incompleteness is feasible only when the participants share norms that can allay fears of...

Chapter 3 explains why it makes sense to conceptualize international authority as delegation and pooling, and how these abstract qualities can be measured. A processual model of IO decision making disaggregates the rules for agenda setting, final decision making, bindingness of decisions, ratification, and dispute settlement across each of six deci...

Why do states sacrifice the national veto in international organizations? A large membership IO can exploit economies of scale and allow states to cooperate over problems that would otherwise confront them individually. However, cooperation among a large number of states brings the danger of decisional blockage. The most plausible explanation for w...

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...

On 5 and 6 July 2019, the four member states of the Pacific Alliance (PA) will meet in Lima, Peru, for the XIV Presidential Summit. With the rapidly changing both Latin American and international context, the meeting might well be the most important one since the group’s creation in 2011. The convergence with the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR),...

Why have many regional organizations adopted common markets and customs unions? This article proposes a cognitive diffusion mechanism – termed frame diffusion – to explain convergent institutional choices across structurally diverse settings. Using Strang and Meyer’s (1993) notion of ‘theorization’ to combine foundational work on framing with the l...

Regional organizations have been widely criticized for lacking democratic legitimacy, but these criticisms have been rather ad hoc, concerned with single case studies and reliant on unclear standards or metrics. Are all organizations similarly deficient? And how does the European Union (EU), the target par excellence of the criticisms, fare in comp...

What drives processes of institution building within regional international organizations? We challenge those established theories of regionalism, and of institutionalized cooperation more broadly, that treat different organizations as independent phenomena whose evolution is conditioned primarily by internal causal factors. Developing the basic pr...

Why are some institutional designs perceived as more legitimate than others, and why is the same institutional design sometimes perceived as legitimacy-enhancing in one setting and not in another? In a world in which most international organisations (IOs) do not fully embody societal values and norms, such as democratic participation and equal trea...

Dieses Kapitel bietet einen knappen Überblick über das Forschungsfeld der Vergleichenden Regionalismusforschung (VRF). Eingangs bestimmen wir das Forschungsfeld durch seinen empirischen Gegenstandsbereich – den Regionalismus – sowie die Methode des Vergleichs und verorten es zwischen der Disziplin der Internationalen Beziehungen und den Regionalstu...

An emerging research programme on diffusion across regional international organisations (RIOs) proposes that decisions taken in one RIO affect decision-making in other RIOs. This work has provided a welcome corrective to endogenously-focused accounts of RIOs. Nevertheless, by focusing on the final design of policies and institutional arrangements,...

This article analyses the relationship between identity and foreign policy in the European Union (EU) - a linkage that we term the ‘identity/policy nexus’. Our principal argument is that the collective identity of the EU exerts a systematic yet contingent influence on its foreign policy. We develop this argument in three steps. First, we observe th...

This paper surveys fundamental contrasts in the articulation of international authority using a new dataset, constructed by the authors, estimating the composition and decision-making rules of 72 international organizations from 1950 to 2010. We theorize that two modes of governance – general purpose and task specific – represent distinctive ways o...

The number of regional organizations and regional trade agreements has risen sharply since the 1990s. In its wake, comparative research on regionalism has seen a revival. An important strand of this literature asks about the drivers of these developments, but has to date largely neglected a puzzling phenomenon: the similarities between regional org...

Supervisor: Dr Anne Deighton. Thesis (M.Phil.)--University of Oxford, 2007. Bibliography: leaves 103-119.