World polity or world society? Delineating the statist and societal dimensions of the global institutional system

Abstract

Spanish

French

The world society/polity perspective developed by John Meyer, his collaborators, and his students has grown tremendously over the past three decades. It is, however, theoretically and conceptually imprecise in one crucial respect: the very terms by which the perspective is called – ‘world polity’ and ‘world society’ – are used interchangeably and indiscriminately. This article proposes the utility of developing an implicit conceptual distinction between these terms. The world polity and world society describe, respectively, the state-centric and civil society dimensions of the global institutional order. After explicating key differences between the world polity and world society, the author offers suggestions for operationalizing these concepts in empirical research and considers possible avenues of inquiry.

Keywords

Globalization international organizations world culture world polity world society

The world society/polity research program has grown tremendously over the past three decades (for canonical statements, see Meyer et al., 1997; Thomas et al., 1987; for synthetic overviews, see Drori and Krücken, 2009; Jepperson, 2002a). This perspective contends that social actors of all kinds – states, individuals, and organizations – are embedded in and shaped by a global cultural, social, and political environment, resulting in a great deal of decoupled isomorphism among them.

An impressive stock of evidence lends support to this perspective. Despite obvious differences and rampant inequalities among states, policies and practices in a variety of domains tend to converge over time. Government ministries (Kim et al., 2002), constitutions (Beck et al., 2012; Boli, 1987a), mass and higher education systems (Meyer et al., 1992b; Schofer and Meyer, 2005), curricular content (Bromley et al., 2011; Frank and Gabler, 2006; Meyer et al., 1992a), environmental policies (Frank et al., 2000; Schofer and Hironaka, 2005), management principles (Drori et al., 2006), legal structures (Boyle and Meyer, 1998), and citizenship rights (Ramirez et al., 1997) all coalesce around universalistic global scripts and standardized organizational templates.

At the same time, theoretical statements and empirical studies in this program are conceptually imprecise in one fundamental respect: the very terms by which the perspective is called – ‘world society’ and ‘world polity’ – are used interchangeably and indiscriminately.¹ This practice conflates distinct aspects of the global institutional order. I suggest the utility of distinguishing between the global polity and society.

I propose the term world polity be reserved for the state-centric dimensions of the global institutional system. The world polity, in this view, includes not only states and interstate relations, but also the intergovernmental organizations and ‘regimes’ (Krasner, 1982) states create and in which they participate. Conversely, world society is the domain of non-state actors – it comprises a global ‘civil society’ populated by international nongovernmental organizations (Boli and Thomas, 1999), transnational activists (Keck and Sikkink, 1998), and the like. Although the world polity and society coexist and intermingle, the entire system has become less state-centric over time. Global civil society is exponentially more vibrant today than it was even half a century ago. At the same time, the global polity and society have become increasingly interpenetrated since the Second World War.

In some respects, my framework merely develops existing but largely implicit strands of thought within the world society/polity research program. At times, however, it revises common understandings and appropriates existing terminology for new purposes.

Defining ‘world polity’ and ‘world society’

Before elaborating a proposed conceptual and theoretical distinction between the world polity and world society, it is worth considering their extant definitions.

World polity

John Meyer coined the term ‘world polity’ in 1980 to describe a global

… system of creating value through the collective conferral of authority. … It includes state action, as is conventional, but also other forms of collective action that might in the modern social scientific lexicon be dismissed as merely ‘cultural.’ The rules involved may be formed and located in collective cultural or religious processes, but are now often located in state action. (Meyer, 1987 [1980]: 44)

Although this definition refers obliquely to ‘other forms of collective action,’ early theorizing focused on the state – its origins, structures, and actions (Thomas and Meyer, 1984). Even world culture itself, the product of ‘collective cultural or religious processes’ stretching back to medieval Europe, was thought to operate in and through states. Preliminary definitions and expositions therefore had a distinctly statist flavor.

Early work in the world polity tradition emphasized the geographical expansion and structural intensification of state structures (Boli, 1987b; Thomas and Meyer, 1984). Theorists presented these efforts as a corrective on overly economistic and militaristic analyses of globalization (Meyer, 1982). Meyer’s approach represented a radical departure from lines of thought that viewed states as enmeshed in systems of unequal capitalist exchange (Wallerstein, 1974) or military competition (Tilly, 1992). As European powers colonized the globe, they did more than incorporate peripheral zones into the expanding global market; they also established the foundations for the modern nation-state system.² Colonies, after the Second World War, became sovereign (and strikingly isomorphic) nation-states in their own right, so that today virtually the entire landmass of the globe is divided into mutually exclusive and exhaustive national jurisdictions (Strang, 1990).

World society

Whereas preliminary thinking emphasized how ‘the world polity organizes more and more social value in the state’ (Meyer, 1987 [1980]: 48), later efforts paid greater attention to non-state entities. The focus shifted away from the state as such and toward the collective actors – ‘rationalized others’ – that constitute, organize, instruct, and advise states (Meyer, 1999; Meyer et al., 1997). These ‘others’ include international nongovernmental organizations (Boli and Thomas, 1999) and epistemic communities (Haas, 1992). Other civil society entities – perhaps less ‘rationalized’ because they lack the requisite disinterested posture – include principled transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink, 1998) that give voice to non-state groups and pressure states to respect their rights.

Individuals also began to take center stage in global institutionalist thought. Meyer’s (1987 [1980]: 45, 61) original description of the world polity emphasized that the ‘two great constructed primordial social units of the modern world are the individual and the nation-state,’ but noted that ‘the modern state, perhaps even more than the modern individual, is given legitimated primordial status in the world polity.’ The dialectical tension between individuals and states was resolved in the ‘mythology of citizenship’ (Ramirez and Boli, 1987). This synthesis gave individuals standing and status only as members of their respective nation-states; it was wrought within a distinctly state-centric framework.

As the global system became less statist and more ‘societal’ in nature, there was a marked shift from the logic of citizenship to that of personhood (Bromley et al., 2011; Ramirez, 2006; Soysal, 1994). Individuals are no longer defined exclusively or even primarily in terms of their national identities; rather, they assert a wide array of identities and lay claim to universal, ‘deterritorialized’ rights (Frank and Meyer, 2002; Meyer, 2009; Meyer and Jepperson, 2000; Soysal, 1994). They are empowered to act autonomously of (and even against) states.

With the transition from a state-centric world polity to an ontologically diverse and expansive world society, a plethora of non-state actors burst onto the scene. The system grew to include not only newly decolonized states (Strang, 1990) and individuals with rights and standing independent of state membership (Soysal, 1994), but also racial and ethnic groups (Kingsbury, 1992; Olzak, 2006), nongovernmental organizations (Boli and Thomas, 1999; Schofer and Fourcade-Gourinchas, 2001), and transnational regimes (Donnelly, 1986; Krasner, 1982). Whereas international politics were once the exclusive domain of sovereign states and their agents, a panoply of ‘civil society’ actors now play active roles in global affairs.

Meyer and colleagues articulated this less state-centric view in their influential 1997 paper, ‘World society and the nation-state’ (Meyer et al., 1997), whereupon the term world society began to displace world polity in the literature. Figure 1 plots usage of these terms over time, beginning with Meyer’s foundational statement on ‘The world polity and the authority of the nation-state’ in 1980. Although use of both terms was sparse until the mid-1990s, ‘world polity’ was clearly preferred during the early period. After 1997, ‘world society’ became the term du jour.

Figure 1.

Use of ‘world polity’ and ‘world society’ in scholarly work, 1980–2010.

Figure 1 also shows that studies often reference both terms. My reading suggests that, in these instances, the terms are used to situate work within a single approach that happens to go by two names, rather than to describe distinct features of the global system. For example, Schofer’s (2003) analysis of scientific associations proceeds from ‘the core argument … that national societies are surrounded by and embedded in trans-national organizations, culture, and discourse, often referred to as “world society” or the “world polity.” ’ The terms, in this usage, are treated as synonymous and hence interchangeable.

Practitioners did not invest the terminological shift depicted in Figure 1 with deep meaning, according to Drori and Krücken (2009: 17):

In spite of the emphasis on the notion of world society, the label for Meyer’s comparative work as late as 2003 was ‘world polity.’ The subsequent terminological shift – from highlighting the polity to emphasizing society – does not represent a shift of the basic tenets of the approach. Rather, it reflects the roots of world society theory in the intellectual context of American sociology: Meyer’s hesitation to employ the term ‘society’ comes as a reaction to the pre-1960 grand theories and from the post-1960 sociological rush to regard society as an aggregation of individuals.

I argue that the lexical shift was in fact accompanied by an implicit conceptual reorientation that is worth explicating and preserving.

Adumbrating the distinction

Few scholars explicitly distinguish the state-centric and non-statist aspects of the global order. Schofer (2003: 738) alludes to it, suggesting that ‘the social networks and shared culture that preceded international organizations constituted an earlier world polity.’ He referred to the incipient system as a ‘world society’ because that term ‘connotes a lesser degree of centralized organizational structure.’³ Rather than peg the polity/society distinction to the degree of centralization or structuration in the external environment, I emphasize the extent to which different aspects of the system are dominated by nation-states.

Beckfield’s (2008) work gestures toward a similar distinction. He references, in a footnote, the existence of an ‘international civil society’ that is ‘counterpoised’ to the ‘interstate system’ and the ‘international market economy’ (2008: 422). His primary focus, however, was on the interstate system and market economy to the exclusion of international civil society. He writes: ‘Characterization of the world polity as flat contrasts with the vision of the world system as a hierarchical network of nation-states bound by competitive, unequal relations’ (2008: 424). Thus, while Beckfield delineated the system of nation-states from the international market-based economy – a contrast institutionalists have emphasized from the beginning – he obscured the distinction between the world polity and society. He does mention, again in a footnote, that his focus on intergovernmental organizations masks the multidimensionality of the world polity, which also includes international nongovernmental organizations. I wish to amplify this distinction between the intergovernmental polity and nongovernmental society.

Scholars in Hedley Bull’s (1977) English school of international relations delineate the world system’s statist and non-statist dimensions more forcefully. Buzan (2004: 1) defines international society as ‘a clearly bounded subject focused on the elements of society that states form among themselves,’ but points out that world society ‘implies something that reaches well beyond the state towards more cosmopolitan images of how humankind is, or should be, organized.’ Similarly, Clark (2007: 22) treats international society as a system of states, but defines world society as the ‘non-state social world that takes a transnational form, and is distinct from the society of states.’ He argues that world society has become increasingly autonomous from international society, although the two societies are mutually reinforcing. ‘World society,’ he explains, ‘needed international society to give some juridical basis to its norms, and to enforce them; at the same time, international society began to acknowledge merit in extending the scope of its traditional norms, to accommodate those arising from world society’ (2007: 33). The world polity/society distinction I propose would enable global institutional scholars to address similar issues within their own framework.

A brief excursus: World culture

An emphasis on the explanatory import of cultural meanings, contexts, and processes sets world polity/society perspectives apart from the English school and other approaches. For this reason, the overarching approach is sometimes called ‘world culture theory’ (e.g., Ramirez and McEneaney, 1997). As a ‘phenomenological macro-institutionalist’ perspective (Meyer, 1999), world polity/society theorists underscore the constitutive as opposed to expressive dimensions of culture.⁴ World culture is ontological, cognitive, and prescriptive: it defines the basic identities, capacities, and purposes of social actors; it provides these actors with schemata for making sense of the world; and it sets parameters around what is proper or even thinkable in a given historical moment. In this respect, world culture represents the conscience collective of the global system. Durkheim stressed that a society’s conscience collective consists of both cognitive and normative dimensions: it is ontological as well as deontological, defining what is and what should be. So too with world culture, which comprises not only ‘a set of rules and principles that define … the very actors that can legitimately participate in world affairs’ (Lechner and Boli, 2005: 45), but also prescribes the appropriate or desirable behaviors of these actors.

Durkheim never regarded a society’s conscience collective as absolute and uniform. Likewise, although world culture is universalistic in posture and pretension, it is far from universal in provenance or practice. It originates in the Western cultural account, and more specifically Western Christendom (Meyer, 1989; Meyer et al., 1987). Individuals and states, the fundamental actors of world society and polity, ‘have clear religious roots in the sanctified individual soul and collective sacrilized community’ of Christianity (Meyer, 1999: 125).

As with culture in general, world culture both enables and constrains. It provides models for organizing and scripts for acting while simultaneously foreclosing alternative structures and modes of action. In the world polity, colonies became sovereign states molded in the image of their European predecessors, irrespective of whether they were prepared for statehood. Alternative political arrangements such as protectorates and trusteeships are utterly delegitimated and hence unavailable for adoption (Strang, 1990). And in world society, ‘the individualism of world culture works against collectivist forms of transnational organizing’ (Boli and Thomas, 1999: 43). A hypothetically communitarian world culture would almost certainly produce a system in which hierarchical forms rather than voluntary associations provide the core architecture, corporate groups supplant individuals as the primary social actors, and deference to authority takes precedence over personal liberty.

The global institutional system’s statist and societal dimensions

The distinction I make between the ‘world polity’ and ‘world society’ analogizes the distinction between state and society in comparative international research (Badie and Birnbaum, 1983; Jepperson, 2002b; Meyer, 1983; Nettl, 1968; Schofer and Fourcade-Gourinchas, 2001; Soysal, 1994). In Jepperson’s formulation, ‘statist visions locate collective authority in a differentiated, insulated, and charismatic organizational center,’ whereas ‘more societal visions locate purpose and authority in society at large’ (2002b: 66). I extend this distinction to the statist and societal dimensions of global system.

Institutionalists invoke de Tocqueville’s description of the early American polity to describe the basic features of the global system. Meyer et al. (1997: 145) draw a parallel between the ‘cultural and associational life in the nearly stateless American society of the 1830s’ and contemporary world society, whose operation ‘through peculiarly cultural and associational processes depends heavily on its statelessness.’ Others suggest that isomorphism among states is analogous to the homogeneity of individuals and organizations in relatively ‘stateless’ America, as noted by de Tocqueville (Meyer et al., 2006; Strang and Meyer, 1993).

The multiplicity of associations in nineteenth-century America intrigued de Tocqueville because they filled a void that did not exist in his native France. In the United States, where the central government was weak, civil society ‘organized itself’ (Badie and Birnbaum, 1983). Conversely, in France, a strong bureaucratic state insisted on direct ties with its citizens, unobstructed by intervening commitments or memberships (Bendix, 1996 [1964]; Jepperson, 2002b; classically, Rousseau). The impulse to organize was therefore much weaker in statist France than in decentralized America.

The de Tocquevillian analogy is apt, as it nicely captures the ‘stateless’ nature of world society: in the absence of a global state, organizations in a variety of spheres are established and resemble each other in significant ways. But the analogy overlooks a key point. Although the collective political order in nineteenth-century America was indeed weak, the federal subunits – states – were not. As the ‘primordial’ sovereigns of the union, states figured prominently in the American polity, much as nation-states represent the primary units in the world polity. If contemporary world society is reminiscent of America’s vibrant civil society, the stateless world polity recalls, in shadowy fashion, early America’s decentralized political structure.

The analogy extends yet further. Much as the US federal government has grown in size and complexity over time, the world polity has expanded and become densely structurated. Intergovernmental organizations were rare before 1920 (Boli and Lechner, 2001). Absent organizational carriers and conduits, world-cultural ideas and institutions diffused via linkages among states themselves. Scientific associations, for example, spread throughout the pre-Second World War polity in a variety of ways (Schofer, 2003). First, colonization facilitated the direct transmission of organizational models and practices from core to peripheral regions. Metropolitan powers transplanted their institutions to colonies, and colonial elites who studied in metropolitan universities brought ‘core’ ideas home with them. Second, scientific associations were actively promoted by itinerant elites or ‘gentlemen’ who, like the high priests of medieval Christendom, were not bound by place or secular allegiances. Third, diplomatic ties among states served as important conduits for diffusion.

In addition to nodal pathways of diffusion, self-conscious emulation or mimetic isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) also occurred. Countries that existed outside the ambit of the European-based polity, but that aspired to become members of it, strategically imitated European states. Examples abound: Peter the Great’s modernizing reforms in Russia, including his decision to move the imperial capital to the ‘European’ region of his country; the Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman Empire, wherein the government reorganized its legal, financial, educational, and military systems along European lines; and Meiji Japan, which cobbled together a Frankensteinian state based on English, French, Prussian, and American models.

Direct interstate linkages remain integral but assume new forms in the postwar era. Patterns of interaction and exchange among states increasingly occur among their disaggregated subcomponents (Slaughter, 2004). High court judges from different countries meet to discuss relevant case law, facilitating the diffusion of legal norms. Legislators and parliamentarians also network with their counterparts abroad. Such disaggregation makes it difficult to entertain the notion, common among theorists of a realist bent, that states exist as highly integrated unitary actors.

The world polity is also structured by ‘dependence networks’ – security, trade, and organizational relations among nations. These networks have proven quite influential. Goodliffe and Hawkins (2009) showed that countries were more likely to support the International Criminal Court – an institution that violates core tenets of national sovereignty – if their key trade partners also supported the institution. Along similar lines, Torfason and Ingram (2010) found that military alliances facilitate the diffusion of democratic reforms.

Despite the continuing importance of direct interstate linkages, Schofer (2003: 751) argues that ‘as “world society” became structured in concrete international associations after 1945, direct ties among nations mattered somewhat less.’ Vertical ties between states and international organizations now supplement horizontal ties among states. Organizational linkages serve as ‘receptor sites’ that ‘receive, decode, and transmit signals from world society to national actors’ (Frank et al., 2000: 96). They also function as network nodes connecting countries to one another (Hughes et al., 2009; Torfason and Ingram, 2010), thus providing a ‘second-order’ of interstate linkage.

Although much work focuses on nongovernmental organizations (Boli and Thomas, 1999), intergovernmental organizations – world polity institutions par excellence – remain important purveyors of globally legitimated policies and practices. For example, ‘the network forged between states through their joint memberships in intergovernmental organizations’ serves as a primary conduit for the transmission of democratic norms and institutions (Torfason and Ingram, 2010: 356). Likewise, human rights conditions improve in countries with dense ties to rights-respecting states via common memberships in intergovernmental organizations, even when these organizations lack an explicit human rights mandate (Greenhill, 2010).

Interpersonal linkages also promote diffusion. International migration and telecommunications are ‘an important sector of the world polity’ (Clark and Hall, 2011: 871). Migrants carry global norms and scripts across national borders.⁵ Cross-national telephone traffic, too, appears to facilitate diffusion. I suggest, however, that informal networks of this sort form part of world society, rather than the world polity. Migration and telephone conversations belong to the private, civil society dimensions of the global system. Indeed, commentators often regard the state’s inability to curb these cross-border movements of people and ideas as an indicator of diminished sovereignty in a globalizing world (Krasner, 1999).

Quite apart from the interstate, organizational, and interpersonal networks that structure diffusion, world culture is also lodged in what John Meyer has called the ‘social ether.’ The norms, models, and scripts that constitute social reality are often so highly theorized that they do not depend on direct linkages for their diffusion and adoption (Strang and Meyer, 1993). In Durkheimian fashion (Meyer, 2009), world-cultural influences become diffuse and indirect. States and other social actors assimilate policies and practices as if by osmosis through acculturative processes, in addition to mechanisms of socialization and coercion (Goodman and Jinks, 2004). The global system, in other words, is not merely an organizational field through which structures and practices spread (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983); it is also a highly institutionalized environment or ‘sacred canopy’ that shapes identities, structures, and practices in disembedded fashion (Meyer et al., 1997).

Diffuse effects abound. They help explain dramatic growth in school enrollments in countries without mandatory attendance laws (Ramirez and Boli, 1987); the rapid postwar expansion of higher education due to global democratization, scientization, and structuration, independently of national characteristics and effects (Schofer and Meyer, 2005); the ‘drift’ toward improved environmental outcomes in the absence of formal policy changes (Schofer and Hironaka, 2005); the uptick in reports of rape among countries that have not undertaken rape-law reforms (Frank et al., 2009); higher wages for nonunionized workers in regions and industries with strong unions (Western and Rosenfeld, 2011); and the positive effect of international human rights treaties in non-ratifying countries (Cole, 2012). The shift is from a world polity structured by interstate linkages toward a world society in which diffuse cultural dynamics figure much more prominently.

Toward an explicit conceptual and operational distinction

If de Tocqueville’s observations provide a useful touchstone for describing the basic contours of world society, TH Marshall’s inquiry into the nature of citizenship offers an illuminating way to theorize the coexistence of the world polity and society. Marshall (1992 [1950]) grappled with the tension between the legal equality and socioeconomic inequality of citizens. In much the same way, contemporary states are constituted as juridically equal despite gross disparities in their economic and structural capacities (Hironaka, 2005; Jackson and Rosberg, 1982; McNeely, 1995). Although the world polity is premised on the sovereign equality of recognized states, countries are not created equal. The United Nations functions as a ‘membership club’ for nominally equal states (McNeely, 1995) – similar to the way citizenship serves as a membership club for nominally equal citizens (Brubaker, 1992) – even though some countries (e.g., permanent Security Council members) enjoy a privileged ‘primus-inter-pares’ status. Still, the fiction endures.

The Marshallian analogy extends to highlight diachronic changes in the geographical scope and organizing principles of the global system. Much as citizenship status was extended to subpopulations – men without property, women, minorities – incrementally, so that today citizenship is a uniform status that encompasses all members in a polity, world polity membership was originally restricted in all but a few exceptional cases to European states but now extends to countries with disparate cultural traditions and levels of economic development. Membership in the early polity was predicated on the notion of ‘civilization.’ Prominent international jurists opined that ‘to enter the international society of “civilised” states non-European entities had to meet the requirements of the standard set by European states’ (Keal, 2003: 103). These standards produced an early wave of isomorphic changes in state structures, as the westernizing reforms of Petrine Russia, Tanzimat Ottoman Empire, and Meiji Japan attest.

All this changed after the Second World War. Sovereign equality, not civilizational purity, is the postwar polity’s organizing principle. Just as the correlation between whiteness and citizenship in Western nations declined over time, so did the correlation between whiteness and sovereignty in the world polity. But in neither case, for citizens or states, did formal equality lead to the eradication of substantive inequality. Far from it: the conferral of sovereignty to the newly decolonized countries of sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, gave rise to structurally weak states plagued by civil war (Hironaka, 2005; Jackson and Rosberg, 1982).

Beckfield’s (2003) analysis of inequality in countries’ linkages to international organizations is apposite in this context. He found that ‘states are much more evenly integrated into IGOs [intergovernmental organizations] than are the societies in INGOs [international nongovernmental organizations]’ (2003: 418). Wealthy, Western, and ‘core’ states are tied to far more INGOs than their counterparts in poor, non-Western, and peripheral states. Economic and regional factors are much less important in explaining states’ IGO memberships.

Beckfield (2003: 418) advances several possible explanations for his findings. Perhaps there is ‘less inequality in IGO ties than in INGO ties because states resemble each other more than do societies.’ Or it could be that ‘the world culture constructed by IGOs is less susceptible to domination by the core/West than that constructed by INGOs.’ The fact that ‘rich, core, Western states fail to exclude poor, peripheral, non-Western states from existing IGOs’ suggests that less powerful states use IGOs to balance against powerful countries.

I advance an alternative interpretation. Inequality in IGO ties is low not only because states are structurally isomorphic, but precisely because they are constituted as equal members of the international community. Status equality, in turn, translates into greater equity in world polity ties. National societies, conversely, are economically unequal and culturally dissimilar, which produces striking disparities in their organizational ties to world society.

In short, IGO memberships provide a useful measure of a state’s participation in the world polity, whereas INGO linkages tap the extent of its embeddedness in the world society. With few exceptions, this distinction remains implicit. In their analysis of human rights treaty ratification, Wotipka and Tsutsui (2008: 742) intend IGO memberships to measure ‘the impact of governments’ desire to look legitimate in intergovernmental arenas’ and INGO linkages to ‘measure the influence of global civil society.’ IGOs, in other words, represent the interests and prerogatives of states, whereas INGOs represent societal norms.

Boyle and Thompson’s (2001) analysis of individual petitions submitted to the European Commission on Human Rights echoes this distinction. The number of petitions emanating from a country increased as the number of its INGO ties increased, but decreased as a function of IGO ties. INGOs, they surmised, produce a ‘civil society that is particularly active with respect to global issues’ (2001: 329). INGOs help define new forms of human rights abuse, monitor existing abuses, and assist individuals who wish to bring claims against states. IGOs, on the other hand, assign ‘paramount importance’ (2001: 329) to the principle of state sovereignty. Because human rights norms pose a fundamental challenge to state sovereignty, IGOs are associated with lower rates of individual claims making.

This interpretation, that INGOs epitomize world society institutions whereas IGOs are creatures of the world polity, reconceptualizes earlier understandings of international organizations. Boli and Thomas (1999: 26, 28) argued that ‘the development of the INGO population is part and parcel of the general development of the world polity’ and subsequently distinguished ‘between world-polity and inter-state organization.’ In my framework, world-polity organizations (i.e., INGOs) belong to world society, whereas interstate organizations (i.e., IGOs) help to structure the world polity. To be sure, INGOs propagate authoritative rules and standards that states are expected to follow and against which they are judged. In this respect, INGOs help constitute the world polity and operate squarely within that domain. But INGOs wield authority that is informal rather than formal, cultural rather than coercive. As ‘agents,’ INGOs do not represent the interests of any specific principals; instead, their authority derives from wider social and cultural principles.

Despite their different roles and functions in the global system, IGOs and INGOs frequently belong to the same extended networks. Human rights treaties that authorize individuals to petition human rights bodies (Boyle and Thompson, 2001; Cole, 2006) offer a telling example. Here, a treaty regime (to which only states can belong) creates an oversight committee staffed by experts to receive complaints from individuals (acting independently of and against their states), who are often assisted by advocacy groups (such as INGOs). In this fashion, the world polity and society have become highly interpenetrated over time.

Indeed, the United Nations formalized the participation of civil society organizations from its inception. Article 71 of the UN Charter provides that the Economic and Social Council ‘may make suitable arrangements for consultation with non-governmental organizations.’ Nearly 3700 nongovernmental organizations currently enjoy general or special consultative status.⁶

A cross-national analysis of social science textbooks by Bromley and Cole (2016) suggests the validity of differentiating the world polity from world society, and also points to possible relations between them. Textbook depictions of international issues and processes coalesce around two distinct imageries – one more statist, the other largely societal. Issues such as democratization, colonization, and interstate conflict appear in a majority of textbooks, and these ‘statist’ emphases remain durable over a 60-year period. Conversely, although few textbooks discussed social issues (e.g., education, religion, the environment) or identities (e.g., women, children, minorities, immigrants) in international terms shortly after the Second World War, attention increased dramatically over the ensuing six decades. The density of a country’s linkages to INGOs, understood as a proxy for world society integration, predicted expanded societal but not state-centric emphases in textbooks. Their conclusion: ‘World society is not supplanting the nation-state system, but rather is emerging alongside the interstate system as a distinct and differentiated phenomenon.’

Additional considerations on operationalization

How might analysts begin to operationalize the distinction between world polity and society? One solution is simply to treat IGO memberships and INGO linkages as measures of distinct concepts: a state’s degree of embeddedness, respectively, in the world polity and world society. More often than not, analysts indiscriminately use both measures together or either measure in isolation to tap membership in a coherent world polity or society. I suggest that these measures be kept distinct and interpreted as tapping different dimensions of the global institutional system.

Recent research shows, for example, that states’ participation in IGOs reduces levels of political mobilization and violence among ethnic groups, whereas INGO linkages exacerbate inter-ethnic conflict (Koenig and Dierkes, 2011; Olzak, 2006). In this case, intergovernmental or statist and nongovernmental or societal organizations exert contradictory effects.

Likewise, measures such as international migration, telephone traffic, and tourist flows (Clark and Hall, 2011; Tsutsui and Wotipka, 2004) have already been used to operationalize important dimensions of world society linkages, just as dependence networks, interstate linkages, and diplomatic exchanges (Goodliffe and Hawkins, 2009; Torfason and Ingram, 2010) tap elements of world polity integration. All that remains is to make these dimensions conceptually and theoretically explicit.

The KOF Index of Globalization (Dreher, 2006) offers another way to measure states’ embeddedness in the world polity and society. This index measures the economic, political, and social dimensions of globalization. The economic component pertains to the level of a country’s integration into the global capitalist system.⁷ The political component reasonably taps a state’s embeddedness in world polity: it indexes IGO memberships, participation in UN Security Council missions, ratification of international treaties, and the number of embassies in a country. The social component includes measures of interpersonal contact (e.g., telephone traffic, international tourism, foreign population) and cultural proximity. This index overlaps substantially (albeit imperfectly) with global institutionalist understandings of world society.

Table 1 presents correlations among the KOF economic, social, and political globalization indices and several other measures: INGO linkages, IGO memberships, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and an indicator for Western countries (Huntington, 1996). Of the three globalization indices, GDP per capita correlates most strongly with the social dimension (r = .760), followed by economic (r = .589) and political (r = .486) globalization. Similar albeit less pronounced associations characterize the relationship between Western status and social, economic, and political globalization (r = .644, .555, and .433, respectively). Western and wealthy countries are more dominant in INGOs than in IGOs (Beckfield, 2003). GDP per capita correlates with INGO linkages at r = .689, compared with r = .497 for IGO memberships. Similarly, Western status correlates with INGO linkages and IGO memberships at r = .576 and .391, respectively.

Table 1.

Correlations among different dimensions of globalization.

	GDPper capita	Western country	INGO linkages	IGO memberships	Economic globalization	Social globalization
GDP per capita	1.000
Western country	.628	1.000
INGO linkages	.689	.576	1.000
IGO memberships	.497	.391	.683	1.000
Economic globalization	.589	.555	.574	.275	1.000
Social globalization	.760	.644	.701	.408	.810	1.000
Political globalization	.486	.433	.738	.785	.363	.505

These correlations suggest that social globalization and INGO linkages tap a common underlying dimension – world society embeddedness – whereas political globalization and IGO memberships correspond to a different dimension – world polity integration. Future work would do well to link operational measures more explicitly to these distinct aspects of the global institutional system.⁸

Conclusion

Since its initial formulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the world polity/society approach has grown into a full-scale research program. Several generations of scholars have analyzed the dramatic expansion of the global institutional system as well as its effects on national states and societies. The approach is theoretically sophisticated and empirically rigorous. Nevertheless, I argue that it would benefit from a clearer and more forceful distinction between its statist and non-statist dimensions.

Such a distinction between ‘world polity’ and ‘world society,’ already implicit in much of the literature, would serve a number of purposes. First, it would facilitate the identification of different causal processes at work in the global system. Research demonstrates that formal policies and structures have become increasingly isomorphic over time. Studies also show that world-cultural influences penetrate deep into countries to affect their practices. Often left ambiguous, however, is whether these influences are carried through interstate, organizational (intergovernmental or nongovernmental), and/or interpersonal networks. Distinguishing between world polity and world society mechanisms of diffusion and influence can sharpen our understanding of global institutional processes.

Distinguishing polity from society can also elucidate relationships and tensions within the global system. Under what conditions do the statist and non-statist dimensions of the system reinforce one another? When – and why – do they work at cross-purposes? The complex relationship between state sovereignty and human rights illustrates the tension between polity and society. Sovereignty is a property of states and the Grundnorm of the world polity. Human rights principles, in contrast, seek to protect individuals and vulnerable groups from the arbitrary exercise of state sovereignty. Civil society ‘agents’ – transnational advocacy groups, nongovernmental organizations, and even aggrieved individuals themselves – deftly mobilize these principles to criticize abuses perpetrated by states. At the same time, in the absence of a single, overarching, integrated world state, human rights continue to depend on states for their protection and implementation. Highlighting conceptual and substantive differences between the world polity and society can enable researchers to gain traction in analyzing these dynamics.

Just as important, the world polity/society distinction can nurture a more historically attuned rendition of global institutionalism. With few exceptions, work in this tradition has focused on the post-Second World War period, when world-cultural processes in both the world polity and world society intensified dramatically and became increasingly interpenetrated. But a world polity – as well as a nascent world society – clearly antedated the mid-twentieth century. It is also true, however, that the global institutional system has become less statist during the postwar era: global civil society has thickened and strengthened tremendously over the past five or six decades (Boli and Thomas, 1999; Bromley and Cole, 2016; Schofer, 2003). Delineating between the statist and societal dimensions of the world system offers a foundation for understanding how it emerged and transformed over time.

Here, then, is a case where greater conceptual specificity can yield new theoretical insights without imposing onerous methodological burdens. Existing measures can be easily redeployed or freshly interpreted in ways that give force to the world polity/world society distinction, thereby improving the ability of researchers to explicate the diverse processes, mechanisms, and influences that operate within the global institutional system.

Footnotes

Author’s note

The ideas developed in this article have been shaped by ongoing conversations with Francisco Ramirez, Evan Schofer, David Frank, Patricia Bromley, and above all John Meyer.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Wade M Cole is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah. His recent work analyzes the influence of globally legitimated human rights norms and institutions on a variety of country-level outcomes.

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