Trajectories of Political and Trade Globalization: The Structure and Dynamics of Global Governance, 1810 – 2012

• In Event: 479 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Political Economy

Abstract

Abstract: The phenomenon of global governance is comprised of the systemic processes in which individual nation-states, international organizations and other meso-level actors participate and reproduce the complexity of a global order. As such, this phenomenon has only gained prominence during the last few centuries. In an effort to isolate some of the causal factors in various dimensions of global governance, I explore both its political and economic aspects, focusing longitudinally along the dimensions of centralization/decentralization and integration/disintegration of global affairs. My centralization indicators are based on relative concentrations of power in the League of Nations, United Nations, and the two most recent hegemons (the United Kingdom and the United States), while my indicators for the integration of global governance include a network density measure based on international governmental organizations (IGOs) and nation-states, the measure of international trade as a proportion of world GDP, and a measure of decolonization. The centralization and integration constructs will be an average score of the standardized scores of each of the indicators that comprise it. Standardization will be performed cross-sectionally to control for issues of scale across time. After performing autocorrelation to assess endogeneity, cross-correlations among individual indicators will be run in order to better determine which of the two dimensions of global governance is more explanatory of the other. Further insights should be revealed once individual causal forces are identified.

Author

• Alexis Antonio Alvarez, University of California-Riverside