Inter-Governmental Organizations (IGOs)

Summary: This study includes data on the identity, environmental attributes, and substantive concerns of 240 intergovernmental organizations active in 1970-1971. Variables provide information on the year these organizations were founded, their relations with other intergovernmental and non-governmental international organizations, the number of their state and non-state members, and the geographic region to which the members belonged. Data were also collected regarding the specific issues that the organizations dealt with.

Summary: This data collection describes the membership status of 148 nations in 237 inter-governmental organizations (IGO) that were extant in the 30 five-year periods from 1815-1967. Each nation is coded at five-year intervals for membership types, such as full or associate membership in the particular IGO, and membership or nonmembership in the international system.

Summary: This article explores the constructivists' institutional socialization hypothesis, positing that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) make member-state interests more similar over time, thus promoting interest convergence. We first show how this hypothesis can be tested systematically using relatively new data on dyadic interest similarity and joint structured IGO membership, and then we conduct a series of empirical tests. Our results show strong statistical support for the institutional socialization hypothesis, using both global and more restricted regional samples. We also demonstrate how our results are consistent with a longer-term socialization process and cannot be explained by the short-term effect of institutional information. Finally, we show some limits to the institutional socialization hypothesis. Unstructured IGOs reveal no effect in promoting member-state interest convergence. Following recent theory arguing that great powers in the international s! ystem often use IGOs for coercive means, we find that institutional socialization gets weaker as the power imbalance within the dyad grows.

Summary: This collection contains four datasets describing the membership and characteristics of International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) in 1981 and 1992. For the International Governmental Organizations data (Parts 1 and 2), the variables consist of organizations and the countries are cases. Parts 3 and 4, the Countries and Territories data, list countries as variables and organizations as cases. Additional variables for countries include geography, gross domestic product (GDP), and status of sovereignty. Other variables used to describe the IGOs cover basis for membership, function of IGO, annual budget, and whether the IGO's function was largely scientific.