Henry Farrell

Breaking the Path of Institutional Development? Alternatives to the New Determinism

The concept of path dependence is being used in highly deterministic ways in neo-institutionalist analysis, so that studies using this framework have dif.culty in accounting for, or predicting, change. However, the original Polya urn model from which pathdependence theory draws predicts that alternative paths will be possible. It can then be argued that actors will be able to use these when they perceive a need to change. This article seeks to capture this possibility through accommodating a Bayesian parametric decision-maker interacting with an environment. This makes it possible to examine how change may involve such processes as: the use of past or redundant institutional repertoires; transfer of experience across action spaces; or from other agents, through networks of structured relationships; the emergence of perceived ‘one best’ solutions. This approach points to the need to change how typologies are used in neo-institutionalist research, so that those features of cases that do not .t the pre-conceived framework of a type are not disregarded as ‘noise’, but properly evaluated as potential resources for change.

Interorganizational Negotiation and Intraorganizational Power in Shared Decision Making Early Agreements Under Codecision and Their Impact on the European Parliament and Council

The authors argue that closer attention should be paid to the interorganizational rules of decision making and their implications for intraorganizational processes. They claim that exogenous changes in macro-institutional rules, which result in a move from formal and sequential to informal and simultaneous interaction between collective actors, will lead to changes in individual actors’ respective influence over outcomes within organizations. Certain individuals controlling information flows between organizations will see an increase in their power over legislative outcomes. This begs the question of how organizations will respond to these shifts in the power balance among the individual actors that constitute them. The authors argue that collective actors that centralize coordination over dealings with external actors will respond effectively through internal rule change. In contrast, collective actors with multiple, ill-coordinated links to other organizations will find it difficult to change internal rules. The authors empirically explore the general argument by analyzing the relationship between the Council and the European Parliament in the process of codecision and its implications for intraorganizational processes.

Making global markets: Historical institutionalism in international political economy

ABSTRACT As dramatically evidenced by the global financial crisis, the interaction of domestic regulatory systems has significant international consequences. Nevertheless, these relationships have received only limited attention from international relations scholars. This special issue, therefore, provides a detailed examination of international market regulation – the processes through which the domestic regulatory activities of states and other actors set the effective rules of internationally-exposed markets. To this end, we borrow and extend on arguments developed by historical institutionalists in comparative politics and American political development. In particular, the contributions adapt two mechanisms – policy feedbacks and relative sequencing – to explain state and bureaucratic preferences over international market regulation as well as bargaining strength in relevant negotiations. In addition to contributing to central IPE debates about international economic governance, the individual contributions shed light on a number of important empirical domains such as corporate accounting, intellectual property, pharmaceuticals, hedge funds, and financial market standardization.

Domestic Institutions beyond the Nation-State: Charting the New Interdependence Approach

What is the relationship between domestic and international politics in a world of economic interdependence? This article discusses and organizes an emerging body of scholarship, which the authors label the new interdependence approach, addressing how transnational interactions shape domestic institutions and global politics in a world of economic interdependence. This literature makes three important contributions. First, it examines how domestic institutions affect the ability of political actors to construct the rules and norms governing interdependent relations and thus present a source of asymmetric power. Second, it explores how interdependence alters domestic political institutions through processes of diffusion, transgovernmental coordination, and extraterritorial application and in turn how it changes the national institutions mediating internal debates on globalization. Third, it studies the shifting boundaries of political contestation through which substate actors affect decision making in foreign jurisdictions. Given the importance of institutional change to the new interdependence agenda, the authors suggest several instances where historical institutionalist tools might be exploited to address these transnational dynamics, in particular, mechanisms of cross-national sequencing and change strategies of substate actors. As globalization continues, it will be ever more difficult to examine national trajectories of institutional change in isolation from each other. Equally, it will be difficult to understand international institutions without paying attention to the ways in which they both transform and are transformed by domestic institutional politics. While the new interdependence approach does not yet cohere as a single voice, the authors believe that it offers an innovative agenda that holds tremendous promise for both comparative and international relations research as it calls on scholars to reconsider the dynamic nature of globalization for global politics.

Codecision and institutional change

This article examines the sources and processes of institutional change in one important aspect of EU politics – the legislative procedure of codecision – and shows how interstitial change of institutions that emerges between formal Treaty revisions and under specific conditions may be formalised in subsequent formal Treaty reforms. We develop two related models of Treaty change. First, in a ‘simple’ model, informal rules will be formalised in the Treaty text where all member states are in agreement, and will be rolled back when all member states oppose them; otherwise they will continue in existence at the informal level. Second, in a more complex framework, actors that have effective veto powers in a related arena may make credible threats that allow them to press member states into formalising informal rules, provided that member states are not unanimously opposed to this formalisation. We empirically assess our claims in the light of several instances of informal rules applied in the codecision procedure.

Introduction: Contested competences in the European Union

In this article, we set out an approach to European Union politics that seeks to explain its development using theories of institutional change. In contrast to dominant theories which assume that the Treaties, the governing texts of the European Union, faithfully ensure that the desires of member states are respected, we argue that these theories are incomplete contracts, rife with ambiguities. This means that during periods between Treaty negotiations, we may expect that collective actors in the European Union policy process – the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council – will each seek to bargain over these ambiguities so that their effective competences are maximised. Their ability to negotiate successfully will depend on their bargaining strength. These ‘conflicts over competences’ may lead to the creation of informal institutions. They may also in the longer term lead to formal institutional change, if they become folded into Treaty texts, or otherwise influence them, in subsequent rounds of negotiation.

A rationalist-institutionalist explanation of endogenous regional integration

Abstract What is at the basis of regional integration and what are the processes that drive integration? Why do integration processes develop faster in some issue areas than in others? These questions are at the heart of our own work, just as they are the driving concerns of Ernst Haass version of neofunctionalism. While we, unlike Haas, emphasize endogenous processes of institutional change based on bargaining processes in a particular institutional context, rather than exogenously driven processes of technical needs and spillover, we believe that there is important overlap between our approach and Haass, as well as areas of disagreement. By exploring these areas of overlap in this article, we hope – by focusing on bargaining processes – to empirically illustrate on the one hand how our approach may help to answer questions that Haass version of neofunctionalism had difficulties with, and on the other how Haass emphasis on epistemic factors can alleviate some of the blind spots in our own perspective.

Ontology, methodology, and causation in the American school of international political economy

ABSTRACT This paper explores disjunctures between ontology and methodology in the American school to better understand both the limits of this approach and ways we can counter its blind spots. Tierney and Maliniaks TRIP data point to a strong elective affinity between, on the one hand, rationalist/liberal ontological assumptions and quantitative methodologies, and on the other, constructivist assumptions and qualitative methodologies. This affinity is neither natural nor obvious, as is discussed. It also raises deeper issues for the field about the nature of causation. As a variety of philosophers of science have insisted, we need to do much better in thinking about the relationship between our underlying notions of causation and the methodological tools that we employ. By so doing, we will not only be able to better build social-scientific knowledge, but also better help bridge the empirical-normative gap that Cohen identifies. More broadly, the paper suggests that by combining a more thoughtful approach to causation with a broadly pragmatist approach to the philosophy of science we can both remedy some of the defects of the American school of international political economy, and provide some pointers to the British school, too.

Watching From Afar: Media Consumption Patterns Around the Arab Spring

Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring- related content using a unique data set constructed by combining archived Twitter content with metadata drawn from the URL shortening service Bit.ly. This data set allows us to explore two critical research questions: First, were links posted to Twitter (among other platforms) followed primarily by individuals inside the affected country, within the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region or by those outside the region and country? And second, who attracted more attention online: protesters and other nonelite citizens or traditional news organizations? Our findings suggest that the vast majority of attention to Arab Spring content came from outside of the MENA region and, furthermore, that mass media, rather than citizen media, overwhelmingly held the worlds attention during the protests. We thus conclude that Twitter was broadly useful as an information channel for non-MENA onlookers but less so for protesters on the ground.Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring–related content using a unique data set constructed by combining archived Twitter content with metadata drawn from the URL shortening service Bit.ly. This data set allows us to explore two critical research questions: First, were links posted to Twitter (among other platforms) followed primarily by individuals inside the affected country, within the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region or by those outside the region and country? And second, who attracted more attention online: protesters and other nonelite citizens or traditional news organizations? Our findings suggest that the vast majority of attention to Arab Spring content came from outside of the MENA region and, furthermore, that mass media, rather than citizen media, overwhelmingly held the world’s attention during the protests. We thus conclude that Twitter was broadly useful as an information channel for non-MENA onlookers but less so for protesters on the ground.

The New Politics of Interdependence Cross-National Layering in Trans-Atlantic Regulatory Disputes

How are regulatory disputes between the major powers resolved? Existing literature generally characterizes such regulatory disagreements as system clash, in which national systems of regulation come into conflict, so that one sets the global standard, and the other adjusts or is marginalized. In this article, we offer an alternative account, which bridges early literature on interdependence with work from Historical Institutionalism in comparative politics. We argue that rule overlap creates opportunities for regulatory actors to develop transnational alliances in support of an alternative institutional agenda. Over time, the resulting “cross-national layers” have the potential to transform domestic institutions and in turn global rules. International regulatory disputes are less discrete international conflicts between sovereign jurisdictions than ongoing battles among regulatory actors within jurisdictions (and alliances across them). We examine two critical issue areas—surveillance information sharing and accounting standards—which allow us to contrast our argument against standard accounts emphasizing veto points and switching costs, respectively.