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Intergovernmental Organizations and Foreign Policy Behavior: Some Empirical Findings*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

James M. McCormick  and
Young W. Kihl
James M. McCormick
Affiliation:
Iowa State University
Young W. Kihl
Affiliation:
Iowa State University
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Abstract

In this study, we evaluate whether the increase in the number of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) has resulted in their increased use for foreign policy behavior by the nations of the world. This question is examined in three related ways: (1) the aggregate use of IGOs for foreign policy behavior; (2) the relationship between IGO membership and IGO use; and (3) the kinds of states that use IGOs. Our data base consists of the 35 nations in the CREON (Comparative Research on the Events of Nations) data set for the years 1959–1968.

The main findings are that IGOs were employed over 60 percent of the time with little fluctuation on a year-by-year basis, that global and “high politics” IGOs were used more often than regional and “low politics” IGOs, that institutional membership and IGO use were generally inversely related, and that the attributes of the states had limited utility in accounting for the use of intergovernmental organizations. Some of the theoretical implications of these findings are then explored.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 73 , Issue 2 , June 1979 , pp. 494 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1979

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Footnotes

*

Support for this research was provided by the Iowa State University Grants Committee in the form of an initiation grant to the first author. Special thanks are due Charles Hermann and his co-investigators on the CREON Project for allowing use of these data in this study. The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research provided a copy of the CREON data set after the CREON investigators released it for use in this project. We also thank several reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts. Neither the original collectors of the data, the Consortium, nor the reviewers bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.

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