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This book explores when, why, and how regional organizations adopt and design institutions to promote and protect fundamental standards of democracy, human rights, and rule of law in their member states. These regional institutions have spread globally. While their institutional designs have become increasingly similar over time, regional particularities persist. The book identifies factors that generate the demand for regional institutions and shape its institutional design. The argument combines hitherto juxtaposed explanatory factors of demands and diffusion by integrating them in a single framework and clarifying under what conditions the interplay between demands and diffusion plays out in the adoption and design of regional institutions. The book provides a comprehensive overview of regional democracy, human rights, and rule of law institutions based on two original datasets and draws on multivariate statistical analysis as well as case studies on the making and change of regional institutions in the Organization of American States and the Organization of African Unity/African Union.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Explaining Regional Democracy, Human Rights, and Rule of Law Institutions.- Chapter 3: Patterns of regional democracy, human rights, and rule of law institutions.- Chapter 4: Accounting for variation in the adoption and design of regional democracy, human rights, and rule of law institutions: A spatial econometric approach.- Chapter 5: The Organization of American States: Pioneering the adoption and design of institutions.- Chapter 6: The Organization of African Unity and African Union: Following the design of reference models.- Chapter 7: Conclusion.- Index.
About the author
Sören Stapel is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Freiburg, Germany. His research interests include global and regional governance, norm and policy diffusion, human rights, and overlapping regionalism. He recently published Comparing Regional Organizations (Bristol University Press, 2020, with Diana Panke and Anna Starkmann).
