The Social Origins of Institutions: History, Expectations, and Governance

• In Event: Growth and Decay of International Institutions

Abstract

What determines the membership scope of international organizations and the level of authority delegated to them? Throughout history, a dizzying variety of international organizations have been created to foster cooperation between polities, from federal states and unions to loose concert systems, each with its own membership structures, from the universal to the regional. A large existing literature focuses on the determinants of both choices, drawing alternately from rational design and social-historical perspectives. I argue in this paper that each of these approaches gives valuable insights into international organizations in history, but each also poses puzzles. I develop a novel theory of organizational emergence, arguing that international organizations are fundamentally solutions to trust problems, and thus that the distribution of expectations across a political system will determine both how much authority states are willing to cede to new organizations and which states will seek to join. To develop this argument, I develop a novel agent-based model that develops a generative theory of international governance, unifying historical and rationalist approaches. I illustrate the insights of this model with mixed-method case evidence. This paper contributes in fundamental ways to our understanding of the social and historical forces underlying the design and scope of political institutions, endogenously explaining the wide variety of solutions to facially similar problems throughout history.

Author

• David Peterson, University of Michigan