Oligarch vs. nationalist: Ukraine's 2014 parliamentary elections

Ukraine’s October 2014 elections resulted in a parliament divided between three new major power blocs: the Poroshenko Bloc, the People’s Front, and the Opposition Bloc. Formed from the atomized remnants of Ukraine’s pre-Maidan parliamentary landscape, the new parties differ strongly in their bases and visions for the future of Ukraine. Ukraine transitioned from a bipolar party system, mainly based on the regional patronage networks of prominent oligarchs from western and eastern Ukraine, to a post-Maidan electoral landscape where the ruling Poroshenko Bloc depends on an uneasy alliance with the activist nationalists of the People’s Front to advance badly needed economic and security reforms. The end of the old party system had the positive outcome of bringing to power a more technocratic administration that has the chance to preserve Ukrainian national unity and steer the country toward transparency and prosperity. Current challenges are the fragility of the ruling coalition, which can only gain legitimacy by improving economic conditions and avoiding corruption, and the extreme-right tendencies of some volunteer units fighting on behalf of the government in the Donbass. The tense February 2015 Minsk II peace accord and the threat of Russia deepening its support for the separatists is likely to further damage the Ukrainian government’s dwindling resources and its capacity for reform

Legitimacy and the cognitive sources of international institutional change: The case of regional parliamentarization

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 is cognitive in nature. Using survival analysis, we evaluate these mechanisms with a novel dataset on the establishment of parliamentary institutions in thirty-six regional organizations between 1950 and 2010. We find that the empowerment of supranational secretariats, engagement with the European Union, and parliamentarization in an organization's neighborhood increase the likelihood of regional parliamentarization. This suggests that legitimacy judgments that draw on cognitive referents provide an important source of international institutional change. We illustrate the underlying cognitive emulation mechanism with a case study of parliamentarization in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations

GEOGRAFIA E O POTENCIAL MARÍTIMO DE CHINA E IRÃ

Geographical factors – in particular location, length and terrain of the coastline, and SLOCs – enable us to assess the maritime potential of two key emerging powers: China and Iran. Referring to said geographical factors, we also derive specific features of the Chinese and Iranian naval strategies, and conclude with an outlook on their geographically shaped “strategic cultures”. Pursuing this approach to international relations/security studies, we seek to revitalize classical geopolitical thinking.Fatores geográficos – particularmente localização, comprimento e relevo da área costeira, além das SLOCs – permitem-nos analisar o potencial marítimo de duas importantes potências emergentes: China e Irã. Utilizando os supracitados fatores geográficos, também derivamos específicas características das estratégias navais chinesas e iranianas, e concluir com um panorama quanto às suas “culturas estratégicas” geograficamente definidas. Almejando essa abordagem dos estudos de segurança e relações internacionais, nós buscamos revitalizar o clássico pensamento geopolítico

Discovering cooperation : endogenous change in international organizations

Published online: 14 December 2023Why 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 these IOs can adopt new policies or strengthen collaboration in existing areas. This, in turn, triggers a demand for delegation. However, this logic is mediated by the political regime of the IO. In predominantly democratic IOs, delegation is constrained by politicization which intensifes as an IO’s policy portfolio broadens. These claims are tested using an updated version of the Measure of International Authority dataset covering 41 regional IOs between 1950 and 2019. Controlling for alternative explanations and addressing potential endogeneity across a range of model specifcations, we fnd robust support for our argument

Institutional pioneers in world politics: Regional institution building and the influence of the European Union

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 premise of ‘diffusion theory’ — meaning that decision-making is interdependent across organizations — we argue that institutional pioneers, and specifically the European Union, shape regional institution-building processes in a number of discernible ways. We then hypothesize two pathways — active and passive — of European Union influence, and stipulate an endogenous capacity for institutional change as a key scope condition for their operation. Drawing on a new and original data set on the institutional design of 34 regional international organizations in the period from 1950 to 2010, the article finds that: (1) both the intensity of a regional international organization’s structured interaction with the European Union (active influence) and the European Union’s own level of delegation (passive influence) are associated with higher levels of delegation within other regional international organizations; (2) passive European Union influence exerts a larger overall substantive effect than active European Union influence does; and (3) these effects are strongest among those regional international organizations that are based on founding contracts containing open-ended commitments. These findings indicate that the creation and subsequent institutional evolution of the European Union has made a difference to the evolution of institutions in regional international organizations elsewhere, thereby suggesting that existing theories of regionalism are insufficiently able to account for processes of institution building in such contexts.peerReviewe