The Social Structure of the World Polity

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Abstract:

The world polity is conceptualized as a network of international organizations and states. A rapidly growing sociological literature argues that many policies of modern states, such as educational expansion, environmental protection, human rights, and economic liberalization, are shaped by embeddedness in this network, and yet the structure of this network itself is rarely examined. This absence of empirical analysis of the social structure of the world polity is surprising, given that world polity theory, in contrast to traditional realist approaches, argues that the world polity should be an increasingly dense, even, flat field of association. This paper tests these structural claims using a formal network analysis of the complete population of intergovernmental organizations as it has evolved since 1820. The world polity is a bipartite network: States are interlinked through memberships in organizations, and organizations are interlinked through their member states. Analysis of this network structure reveals growing fragmentation—not integration—in the world polity driven by intergovernmental organizations that have become less densely connected by common member states, increasingly centralized around a few prominent organizations, and increasingly heterogeneous in structural position. This fragmentation reflects a recent rise in the regionalization of the world polity.

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