Theories and Empirical Studies of International Institutions

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Abstract:

The article is organized into three major sections. The first section provides an analytical review of the development of studies of international institutions. From the beginning, the pages of IO have been filled with insightful studies of institutions, in some cases asking questions consistent with the research agenda we propose in this essay. But the lack of a disciplinary foundation in the early years meant that many good insights were simply lost, not integrated into other scholars' research...
The second section explicitly addresses a theme that arises from the review of scholarship on institutions; whether international politics needs to be treated as sui generis, with its own theories and approaches that are distinct from other fields of political science, or whether it fruitfully can draw on theories of domestic politics...
The third section turns to the problem of research agendas. Where does scholarship on international institutions go next? Our primary argument in this section is that attention needs to focus on how, not just whether, international institutions matter for world politics...

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