Melanie M. Hughes University of Pittsburgh
In this proposal, the investigators link world polity and social networks to inform the development of a new over-time measure of country-level connectedness to the world polity, labeled the "INGO Network Country Score." This measure will score countries by their centrality in the world country-INGO network. The resulting published dataset will be useful to a cross-disciplinary audience. In a second part of the project, an in-depth analysis is carried out on one domain of INGOs-Women's International Nongovernmental Organizations, or WINGOs. The investigators draw upon theories of the international women?s movement to provide testable theories about expected changes in the WINGO network structure over time.
Broader Impacts The proposed project will have broad impact for academic researchers in the fastest growing areas of political sociology and political science. The dataset generated here will provide a substantial resource for researchers who study global processes, international organizations, and cross-national outcomes.
This collaborative grant unfolded in two phases. Phase I was data collection and was coordinated at the University of Pittsburgh (SES-0962034). Phase II involves analysis of the data and was coordinated at the University of Texas-Austin (SES-1067218). The main task of Phase I was to collect data on international organizations in order to develop a new over-time measure of country-level connectedness to the world polity. Collecting longitudinal data on international organizations was time-intensive and challenging. Using published yearbooks and an online database, we collected data on more than 3,000 international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) at twelve points over a 58-year period -- 1950, 1955, 1960, 1965, 1973, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, and 2008. The dataset generated will provide a substantial resource for researchers who study global processes, international organizations, and cross-national outcomes. Phase I also involved collecting data on women's international nongovernmental organizations, or WINGOs. Since the late 1800s, WINGOs have actively sought to promote women’s rights and status at global, regional, national, and local levels. Yet, we know little empirically about the rise of these organizations globally, especially since 1985. We collected data on more than 450 WINGOs founded between 1875 and 2008. These data provide the first longitudinal dataset on women’s international organizations across countries over time. Phase II created the INGO Network Country Score, based on Hughes et al. (2009), for all years and all countries, as well as a number of other network measures of country connectedness. These are new measures of country connections to INGOs and have the potential to transform our understanding of global phenomena. For INGOs, we find that measurement does matter for the effect of INGOs on outcomes like human rights treaty ratification. Further, when looking at the network of INGOs over time, we find increasing density, but continuing strong regional differences in the extent to which and rate at which countries are integrating into the world polity network. For WINGOs, we find evidence of declining but persisting global inequality in country ties to women's international organizations. Activist and feminist organizations, in particular, have increased the centrality of the global South in networks of women's organizations. These changing patterns of women's global organizing have implications for women's movements and women's rights around the world. For example, we find that WINGOs do positively influence gender quota adoption but that this effect has diminished over time as international pressure to include women has increased. This effect is much stronger for activist than nonactivist WINGOs. World polity theory and analysis is fundamentally interested in how connections between states, as well as overarching norms created through INGOs, influence states to ratify treaties and adopt policies. Many of the "best practice" policies promoted in the international sphere are concerned with human rights, education policy, environmental issues, etc. that influence the day-to-day lives of citizens around the world. Proper network measurement of the processes by which international norms are created and disseminated will improve understanding and enable policymakers to be more efficient in disseminating best practices around the globe.
