Decline of empires

Someone has figured out a clever way to look at the fall of maritime empires (from Andrew Sullivan):

It is a neat way to show the diffusion of modern nation-states (as well as the decline of colonial empires). One can imagine a similar video showing the expansion of various global organizations, with lots of little bubbles representing a bunch of smaller NGOs. Or, maybe someone can figure out a way to show the proliferation of micronations?

Amusing For Those Studying the Global Environmental Movement

OK, I try not to post too much fluff, but I found this to be pretty amusing.

If Star Wars was made by environmentalists…

Updated World Society Bibliography

John Boli just sent around an updated world society/world polity bibliography (created by John, Selina Gallo-Cruz, and Matthew Mathias).  It is a tremendous resource — 42 pages of references!  Every time I look at it, I see something new that I want to read.

Click here to download:  World Society-Polity bibliography 1 Sept 09

Institutionalism and the “Citation Core” of Sociology

Kieran Healy posted this fascinating network graph created by Jim Moody.  The graph shows the most cited papers in ASR, AJS ,and Social Forces over the last 10 years.

Kieran’s observations can be found here.  I thought it was interesting in a number of ways.  But, for the purposes here, it was surprised to see that institutional theory is really in there (see my red highlight).  More than I expected.  In fact, it pretty much dominates the “orgs” section in the graph (obviously things would look different if ASQ were included).

Note:  Click on it to see the image directly (at which point you can then click again to magnify it).

Obviously, Meyer & Rowan 1977 and Dimaggio & Powell 1983 are right there.  But there are also several others.  The Meyer, Boli, Ramirez, Thomas article in AJS gets a lot of cites.  So does the Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan ASR paper on human rights.  And, the Frank, Hironaka, Schofer ASR paper on global environmentalism is there, too (yay!).

The most-cited pieces are either the classic cites (e.g., Meyer and Rowan, D&P) or main substantive pieces in rapidly expanding research areas (the nation-state, human rights, environment).

Also, interesting to see where the institutional work fits in the overall graph:  Institutionalism is mostly part of the “orgs” cluster, but also close to the movements/political soc group.  Kinda makes sense.

Anyhow, I may add more later… there’s a lot to say about this picture.

International Communication and Global Culture

John Meyer emailed me about an interesting paper at ASA:

Rob Clark and Jason Hall presented a paper entitled “The International Telecommunications Network and Human Rights.”  The paper explores the idea that global telecommunication may be a useful measure of global cultural embeddedness, similar to “INGO membership”.  It turns out that their measure predicts human rights scores.

It is really important to keep developing measures of global embeddedness, going beyond what we have — which is pretty much just measures of international association (INGOs).

Obviously, INGOs are great.  John Boli & George Thomas’s book (Constructing World Culture) does a great job of explaining how INGOs are an important embodiment of world culture.  And, INGOs work really well in predicting a lot of things.  AND, people have largely come to accept INGOs as the “standard” way to test world polity effects.  But, it isn’t great to be wholly dependent on a single measure which, like all cross-national data, has its quirks.  Moreover, there’s a tendency to reify measures — to start thinking that INGOs = world culture, and to forget about other interesting stuff, like communication, media, movement of people/students, etc.

Anyhow, John Meyer had an exchange with the authors of this new paper and learned how they created their measure.  They started with a matrix of calls to & from each country (separately for incoming and outgoing calls).  Then they dichotomized — essentially creating dummies of whether any dyad has a relationship.  Finally, they used degree centrality — calculating the total number of other countries a given country is linked to.  Also, since telecommunication was strongly correlated with INGOs, they residualized the telecom variable to reduce collinearity.

The authors found that (residualized) incoming telecommunication had a positive effect on human rights scores.  Outgoing calls didn’t.

Seems like a reasonable approach.  Of course, one could think of other good ways to do it — which would be worth trying — such as normalizing by country size in some way, or dealing with the actual density of calls.  Also, it wasn’t entirely clear whether the zeros were all real or might include missing data.  Finally, it would be useful to see which countries score high/how.  I wondered:  Are the paper’s findings general to all cases, or mainly due to a few extreme “basket case” countries like North Korea, which might be outliers?

Anyhow, I was really glad to learn of this interesting paper.  It suggests a new direction for thinking about and operationalizing world polity/world society processes.  We should definitely be exploring this type of data.

Participation in International Tests

Tricia also put up a measure of national participation in international educational tests.

It is a neat idea that Chiqui mentioned a while back.  We didn’t discuss it extensively, but I think the idea was that participation in the IEA testing regime might affect national educational policies.  Participating in testing activates a sense of competition — putting nations in more of a ‘horesrace’ mentality.  And, it stratifies nations, which facilitates copying/diffusion.  You know who is ‘winning’ and might choose to emulate them.

New Environment Treaty Data

Tricia just posted some new environmental treaty data from UNEP, in STATA format.  It doesn’t cover as many treaties as David Frank’s dataset, but it covers 12 important ones and is updated through 2009.   Here’s her description:

Time Series from 1960-2009

Data Downloaded from the UNEP GEO Data Portal at: http://geodata.grid.unep.ch/

For treaties, includes all 12 treaties listed on the UNEP GEO data portal, except the UN Framework.  Treaty data is listed as missing “.” for years before the treaty existed, coded as “0” before a country joined, and “1” for all years after joining.  Variable name is official treaty name, original source and years of treaty in dataset.

Updated Paper: The Sources of Association

Wes and I just wrapped up a new draft of our paper “The Structural Sources of Associational Life.” We’re pretty happy with the new version.

We argue that the state and the world polity have become engines of association, driving the expansion of civil society. We discuss reasons why and explain how these factors generate different configurations of associational life around the globe.

Again, we play around with some fancy models — like the Arelleno-Bover/Blundell-Bond ’system GMM’ panel data estimator. But, as is often the case, the results are pretty much the same with OLS…

The paper can be dowloadedhere:  Schofer Longhofer Sources of Association 6.24.09.  Comments are always welcome.

Miriam Awarded Major ERC Grant

Wonderful news:  Miriam Abu Sharkh was just received a MAJOR award from the European Research Council for her proposal entitled “Global Governance and Gender Disparities. Explaining Developments in Key Labor related Human Rights Indicators”.  She got 5 years of support — Wow!  Congratulations Miriam!

As a separate matter, it is terrific to see that an explictly neo-institutional/world polity project  is being welcomed by major funders in Europe.  It is an increasingly mainstream and legitimate enterprise… which benefits us all.

World Society/World Polity Bibliography

John Boli, Selina Gallo-Cruz, and Matthew Mathias have assembled an outstanding list of world society/world polity research.

It really is tremendous.  I think of myself as generally ‘keeping up on things’, but I saw many references that were totally new to me — work I definitely want to be reading.

NOTE:  This is a draft.  John asks that people report on errors and omissions.  Contact info is listed at the top of the bibliography.

Boli Gallo-Cruz Matthias World Society-Polity Bibliography