Towards increasing regime complexity? Why member states drive overlaps between international organisations
| Published date | 01 November 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221115937 |
| Author | Diana Panke,Sören Stapel |
| Date | 01 November 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221115937
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2023, Vol. 25(4) 633 –654
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481221115937
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Towards increasing regime
complexity? Why member
states drive overlaps between
international organisations
Diana Panke and Sören Stapel
Abstract
Multilateral cooperation in international organisations is characterised by regime complexity.
The literature usually adopts a policy-focused perspective studying the properties, effects, and
dynamics within given regime complexes for different policy areas. Yet few accounts of why
states drive regime complexity have been provided in the literature. Therefore, we adopt a state-
focused perspective and observe how states differ in the extent to which they foster complexity
through overlapping memberships and policy competencies in international organisations. In order
to explain this variation, we extract state motivations from the regime complexity literature,
but also incorporate the role of geopolitical opportunity structures for complexity as well as
interactions between both elements. The empirical analysis reveals that the power to pursue self-
interests leads to duplicated policy competencies, whereas duplicating international organisation
memberships by creating new international organisations or joining existing ones is costly and a
less favoured route towards pursuing substantive gains. The motivation to gain external reputation
also positively influences the overlap in membership and policy competencies. Moreover, the
number of neighbouring states and the disappearance of deep-rooted ideological cleavages are
important opportunity structures for states furthering complexity. Opportunity structures also
reinforce the positive effect of power to pursue self-interests and external reputation motivations
on complexity. Thus, we contribute to regime complexity research in showing that not all states
equally foster regime complexity and this relationship is dependent on a specific context.
Keywords
comparative analysis, geopolitical opportunity structures, interaction effects, international
organisations, motivations for competitive regime creation, regime complexity
Introduction
States have created international organisations (IOs) as arenas in which they could col-
lectively address pressing problems. Since the end of World War II (WWII), states
Seminar für Wissenschaftliche Politik, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
Corresponding author:
Diana Panke, Seminar für Wissenschaftliche Politik, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Belfortstraße 20,
79085 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.
Email: diana.panke@politik.uni-freiburg.de
1115937BPI0010.1177/13691481221115937The British Journal of Politics and International Relations X(X)Panke and Stapel
research-article2022
Original Article
634 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 25(4)
participate in ever more IOs and equip these organisations with an increasingly broad
range of policy competencies, in areas as diverse as trade, security, human rights or the
environment. Thereby, states contribute to a rise in regime complexity. Raustiala and
Victor (2004: 279) define regime complexity as an ‘array of partially overlapping and
nonhierarchical institutions governing a particular issue-area. Regime complexes are
marked by the existence of several legal agreements that are created and maintained in
distinct fora with participation of different sets of actors’.
From a state-perspective, creating complexity is puzzling. On the one hand, joining
multiple IOs with at least one common policy competence requires material and political
resources in the form of negotiation costs, membership fees, and sovereignty costs. On
the other hand, complexity potentially reduces the efficiency and effectiveness of IOs
through a waste of resources and an increase in transaction costs (Bond, 2010; Brosig,
2011), incompatible policy output and outcomes (Gebhard and Galbreath, 2013; Gómez-
Mera, 2015), a weakened sense of legal obligation (Drezner, 2009), and non-compliance
(Panke and Stapel, 2018b). Thus, states that are strongly exposed to complexity are
unlikely to reap the full benefits from cooperation.
In order to shed light on the puzzle of complexity, we adopt a state-centred perspec-
tive. The negative externalities of regime complexity are likely to increase the more over-
lapping organisations a state has joined and the more competencies a state covers
simultaneously in its different IOs. Accordingly, we examine why states join multiple IOs
that have at least one policy competency in common but are not in a hierarchical relation-
ship (overlapping membership) as well as why states equip their IOs with duplicated
policy competencies (overlapping competencies). In other words, by adopting a state-
centred rather than an organisation-centred perspective, complexity can be broken down
into two components; overlapping memberships as well as overlapping policy competen-
cies, both of which could endanger the effectiveness of cooperation beyond the nation-
state. Distinguishing between membership duplication and policy competency duplication
as two dimensions of complexity, we pose the following research question: Why do states
further complexity through overlapping memberships and by equipping organisations
with overlapping policy competencies, and why are some states more prone to fostering
complexity than others?
To address this question, we first draw on regime complexity approaches to situate our
argument and develop a set of hypotheses on why states foster complexity. In addition to
the regime complexity literature, we also include geopolitical opportunity structures,
namely the number of neighbouring states and the presence or absence of deep-rooted
cleavages linked to the Cold War, as well interactions between substantive motivations
and opportunities for cooperation. We expect that state motivations, such as being dis-
satisfied with the status quo, as well as the opportunity structures with which they are
confronted (number of neighbours and presence or absence of deep-rooted cleavages)
increase their inclination towards complexity, both individually and by interaction with
each other.
The yearbook of IO and the Correlates of War dataset together represent the universe of
cases. In order to illustrate whether and how both dimensions of complexity have evolved
over time, we need to select a sample of IOs. To this end, one could select all IOs operating
in one specific policy field, or a specific type of IOs (developmental IOs, task-specific IOs,
global IOs, regional IOs). As we are interested in competency duplications next to mem-
bership duplications, zooming into one policy field is not sufficient. Thus, we need to
select one type of IOs. We opt for regional IOs as they are usually multi-purpose
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