World Polity or World Society?

Delineating the Statist and Societal Dimensions of the Global Institutional System

Wade M. Cole

Department of Sociology

University of Utah

380 S. 1530 E., Room 301

Salt Lake City, UT 841102

(801) 585-5930

wade.cole@soc.utah.edu

January 19, 2013

DRAFT:

Comments welcome, but do not cite or quote without permission

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World Polity or World Society?

Delineating the Statist and Societal Dimensions of the Global Institutional System

Introduction

The world society/polity research program has grown tremendously over the past three decades

(for canonical statements of this approach, see Thomas, Meyer, Ramirez, and Boli 1987 and

Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez 1997; for synthetic overviews, see Jepperson 2002a and

Drori and Krücken 2009). According to this perspective, 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 or structural

homogeneity among them.

Scholars in this tradition have amassed an impressive stock of empirical evidence in support of

their theoretical perspective. Despite obvious differences and rampant inequalities among

societies, institutions, policies, and even outcomes in a variety of domains tend to converge on

common models. Government ministries (Kim, Jang, and Hwang 2002), constitutions (Boli

1987a; Beck, Drori, and Meyer 2012), mass and higher education systems (Meyer, Ramirez, and

Soysal 1992; Schofer and Meyer 2005), curricular content (Benavot, Cha, Kamens, Meyer, and

Wong 1991; Bromley, Meyer, and Ramirez 2012; Frank and Gabler 2006; Frank, Wong, Meyer,

and Ramirez 2000; McEneaney and Meyer 2000; Meyer, Kamens, and Benavot 1992),

environmental policies (Frank, Hironaka, and Schofer 2000; Schofer and Hironaka 2005),

management principles (Drori, Meyer, and Hwang 2006), legal structures (Boyle and Meyer

1998), and citizenship rights (Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan 1997) have all coalesced around

universal scripts and standardized templates.

At the same time, the empirical as well as the theoretical literature is 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. This practice conflates distinct

concepts that refer to different aspects of the global institutional order. In this paper, I suggest the

utility of distinguishing between the global society and polity.

I propose, first, that the term world polity be reserved for the state-centric dimensions of the

global institutional system. The polity, in this view, includes not only states and interstate

relations, but also the organizations (i.e., intergovernmental organizations) and “regimes”

(Krasner 1982) that states create and in which they participate. Conversely, world society is the

domain of non-state (and non-economic) actors—it comprises, for lack of a better term, a global

“civil society” populated by international nongovernmental organizations (Boli and Thomas

1999), transnational activists (Keck and Sikkink 1998), and the like. Although these two aspects

of the global institutional system co-exist and co-mingle, the system itself has become much 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 after World War II.

Defining “World Polity” and “World Society”

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Before setting out to elaborate a proposed conceptual and theoretical distinction between the

world polity and world society, it is first necessary to consider how these terms are defined in the

extant literature.

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 [1980] 1987:44)

Although this definition refers obliquely to non-statist “forms of collective action,” early global

institutionalist theorizing focused almost exclusively on the state—its origins, structures, and

actions (Thomas and Meyer 1984). Even world culture itself, the product of “collective

processes” stretching back to medieval Europe, was thought to operate in and through states.1

Preliminary definitions and expositions of the global institutionalist system therefore had a

distinctly statist flavor.

Early work in the world polity tradition emphasized the geographical expansion and structural

intensification of state structures (Meyer 1987; Boli 1987b; Thomas and Meyer 1984). These

efforts were seen as a corrective on overly economistic and militaristic analyses of globalization

(see, e.g., Meyer 1982). Meyer’s approach represented a radical departure from work that viewed

states as enmeshed in systems of unequal capitalist exchange (Wallerstein 1974) or military

competition (Tilly 1992). For example, as Europeans 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 World War II, 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, 1991).

World Society

Whereas preliminary institutionalist statements and studies emphasized how “the world polity

organizes more and more social value in the state” (Meyer [1980] 1987:48), later efforts paid

1 The world culture concept, while not my primary focus here, is nevertheless central to the world polity/society

perspective. World culture comprises an array of ontological frameworks, cognitive blueprints, and normative

prescriptions that (1) specify the core identities, capacities, and purposes of social actors; (2) provide these actors

with schemata for making sense of the world; and (3) set parameters around what is “proper” or even thinkable in a

given historical moment (Lechner and Boli 2005). It is embodied, expressed, conveyed, and purveyed by

international nongovernmental and governmental organizations (Boli and Thomas 1999; Drori 2005). Thus, world

culture operates in and underlies both the world polity and world society. 2 Prior to his 1980 statement on the world polity, Meyer subsumed the same general ideas under the generic

“world system” label (Meyer and Hannan 1979). The term world polity was no doubt coined in part to distinguish

the institutionalist perspective from Wallerststein’s global economic approach.

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greater attention to the role of non-state entities in the global institutional system. The focus

shifted away from the state as such and toward the collective actors—“rationalized others”—that

constitute, organize, instruct, and advise states (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez 1997; Meyer

1999). These “others” include international nongovernmental organizations (Boli and Thomas

1999), epistemic communities (Haas 1992), and consultants of all stripes. Other civil society

entities—perhaps less “rationalized” (because they lack the requisite disinterested posture) but

no less important—include principled transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink 1998)

that give voice to subnational groups and pressure states to acknowledge and respect these

groups’ rights.

Individuals also began to take center stage in global institutionalist thought. Meyer’s ([1980]

1987:45, 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 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,

according to Ramirez and Boli (1987), in the “mythology of citizenship.” This synthesis,

however, 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 institutional system became less statist and more “societal” in nature, there was a

marked shift from the logic of citizenship to that of personhood (Bromley, Meyer, and Ramirez

2012; Ramirez 2006; Soysal 1994). Individuals are no longer defined exclusively, or even

primarily, in terms of their national identities; rather, they legitimately assert a wide array of

identities and lay claim to universal, “deterritorialized” rights (Frank and Meyer 2002; Meyer

and Jepperson 2000; Meyer 2009; Soysal 1994). They are empowered to act autonomously of—

and even, sometimes, directly against—states.

With the transition from a state-centric world polity to a more ontologically diverse and

expansive world society after World War II, a plethora of non-state actors burst onto the scene.

The global institutional system grew to include not only newly decolonized states (Strang 1990,

1991) 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 1997, 1999; Schofer and Fourcade-Gourichas 1999), and transnational

regimes (Krasner 1982; Donnelly 1986; Meyer, Frank, Hironaka, Schofer, and Tuma 1997).

Whereas international politics was once the sole domain of sovereign nation-states and their

agents, a panoply of “civil society” actors now play active roles in global affairs.

This decidedly less state-centric view of the global institutionalist system was articulated in an

influential 1997 paper, “World Society and the Nation-State” (Meyer, Boli, et al. 1997),

whereupon the term world society began to displace world polity in the literature. Figure 1 plots

the usage of these terms over time, beginning with Meyer’s foundational statement on “The

World Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State” in 1980.3 Although use of both terms was

quite sparse until the mid-1990s, “world polity” was clearly preferred during the early period.

3 The trends are based on a Google Scholar search for the number of scholarly items that use the terms world

polity and/or world society in each year. To ensure that only the global institutional literature is reflected in these

counts, I also included search terms for “John Meyer,” “John W. Meyer,” or “Meyer, John.”

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After 1997, “world society” became the term du jour, in some years outnumbering the use of

“world polity” by a factor of four-to-one.

Figure 1 also shows that both terms are often referenced in the same study. My own reading of

this literature suggests that, in these instances, the terms are used merely to situate work within a

single approach that happens to go by two names, rather than to describe different features of the

global institutional system. For example, Schofer’s (2003) analysis of the expansion of science

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.

The terminological shift depicted in Figure 1 was certainly not invested with any deep meaning

among practitioners. In their overview of global institutionalist lines of thought, Drori and

Krücken (2009: 17) note that:

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 change from world polity to world society was in fact accompanied by an

implicit conceptual reorientation that is worth explicating and preserving.

Adumbrating the Distinction

Few scholars make a conceptual distinction between the state-centric and non-statist aspects of

the global institutional system. Schofer (2003:738) alludes to it; he points out that “the social

networks and shared culture that preceded international organizations constituted an earlier

world polity.” He referred to the early global institutional system a “world society” because that

term “connotes a lesser degree of centralized organizational structure.”4 Rather than peg the

polity/society distinction to the degree of centralization or organizational structuration in the

external environment, I emphasize the extent to which the system—or different aspects of the

system—is dominated by nation-states. Contemporary world society, after all, is highly

structured by dense networks of international nongovernmental organizations. Alternatively, the

world polity can be quite decentralized, as it was prior to the widespread development of

intergovernmental organizations after World War II.

Beckfield (2008:422) also flirted with the notion of a world polity/society 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.” But his primary focus was on

the interstate system (world polity) and market economy (world system) to the exclusion of

4 Nevertheless, Schofer (2003:738) noted that “in the broader neoinstitutional literature, ‘world polity’ and ‘world

society’ are virtually synonymous.

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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” (p. 424). Thus, while Beckfield delineated the system of juridically equal

nation-states from the international market-based economy—a delineation that global

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

consists of international nongovernmental organizations. I wish to amplify this distinction

between the intergovernmental or statist polity and the nongovernmental or non-statist society.

Scholars who take Hedley Bull’s (1977) English school as a point of departure have

distinguished more forcefully the statist and non-statist dimensions of the world system. Buzan

(2004:1), for example, defines international society as “a clearly bounded subject focused on the

elements of society that states from among themselves,” but notes 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, since the nineteenth

century, world society has become increasingly autonomous from international society, although

the two “societies” are mutually reinforcing. “World society,” he writes, “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” (p. 33). The world polity/society distinction I

propose would enable global institutional scholars to address similar issues within their own

theoretical and empirical framework.

The Global Institutional System’s Statist and Societal Dimensions

The core difference between the “world polity” and “world society” analogizes the distinction

between state and society, a distinction that, perhaps ironically, has been quite central in

comparative global institutional theorizing and research (e.g., Jepperson 2002b; Dobbin 1994;

Meyer 1983; Schofer and Fourcade-Gourichas 1999; Soysal 1994; see also Nettl 1968; Badie

and Birnbaum 1983). Jepperson (2002b) has clearly articulated this distinction. “Statist visions,”

he says, “locate collective authority in a differentiated, insulated, and charismatic organizational

center,” whereas “more societal visions locate purpose and authority in society at large”

(Jepperson 2002b:66).

A similar distinction can be made with respect to the statist and societal dimensions of global

institutional system. Global institutionalists frequently invoke Tocqueville’s description of the

early American polity to describe the basic features of the contemporary global institutional

system. Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez (1997:145) drew 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.” Earlier, Strang and Meyer (1993:503) suggested that the existence

of structurally isomorphic states and organizations in world society is analogous to the

homogeneity of individuals and groups in early American civil society, as noted by Tocqueville.

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And more recently, in discussing the proliferation of organizations in world society, Meyer,

Drori, and Hwang (2006) cited Tocqueville’s musings on the tendency of Americans to establish

associations of all shapes and sizes.

The multitude and multiplicity of associations in early American society intrigued 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 the maintenance of direct ties with

its citizens, unobstructed by intervening commitments or organizational memberships (Bendix

[1964] 1996; Jepperson 2002b; more classically, Rousseau). The tendency of individuals to

organize was therefore comparatively much weaker in statist France than in “stateless” America.

Likewise, in some hypothetical global institutional system with a central state, the propensity of

world society to organize itself would presumably be much weaker than it is today (Meyer, Boli,

et al. 1997).

The Tocquevillian analogy is indeed apt, as it nicely captures the “stateless” nature of world

society—in the absence of a global state, organizations of all shapes and sizes have been

established. But the analogy has overlooked a key point. Although the collective political order

in nineteenth-century America was indeed quite weak, the federal subunits—the states—were

not. As the “primordial” sovereigns of the federal union, states figured prominently in the

American polity, much as nation-states are the primary political units in the world polity. (And in

the United States, “states’ rights” discourses resemble the grumblings of politicians who bemoan

the usurpation of national sovereignty by international regimes such as the United Nations.) 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.5

The analogy extends yet further. Much as the U.S. federal government has grown appreciably

over time, the world polity has expanded and become densely structurated. Intergovernmental

organizations were rare before 1920 (Boli and Lechner 2001). Absent these organizational

carriers and conduits, world-cultural ideas and institutions diffused via direct linkages among

states themselves. Schofer (2003), for example, showed that scientific associations spread

throughout the pre-World War II polity in a variety of ways. First, colonization directly

facilitated the transmission of organizational models and practices from core to periphery.

Metropolitan powers transplanted practices and institutions to the 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 sovereign states also served as important conduits for diffusion.

In addition to these “nodal” mechanisms of diffusion, self-conscious emulation—what DiMaggio

and Powell (1983) called mimetic isomorphism—was also common. Countries that existed

5 Within this decentralized political structure, states are formally equal members of the American union; as such,

they enjoy equal representation in the Senate. In practice, however, states are far from equal. This fact is

demonstrated each presidential election season, when candidates focus their attention and resources on states with

large numbers of electoral votes. The juxtaposition of de jure equality and de facto inequality also characterizes the

world polity.

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outside the ambit of the European-based polity, but that aspired to become full-fledged members

of it, strategically imitated European nation states. Examples abound: Peter the Great’s

modernizing reforms in Russia, including his decision to move the 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 self-consciously

European lines; and Meiji Japan, which cobbled together a Frankensteinian state based on

English, French, Prussian, and American models. Nodal contacts shaped these borrowings.

“Japan,” according to Schofer (2003:740), “drew most upon those nations with whom it had

direct ties via diplomatic exchange, trade relations, and missionary contacts.”

Direct interstate linkages continue to form an integral part of contemporary world polity, but

these linkages have assumed new forms in the postwar era. Slaughter (2004) argues that patterns

of direct interaction and intellectual exchange among states increasingly occur among their

disaggregated subcomponents. High court judges from different countries meet regularly to

discuss relevant case law, which facilitates the diffusion of legal norms. Legislators and

parliamentarians also network informally 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 and unitary actors.

The world polity is also structured by “dependence networks” (Goodliffe and Hawkins 2009), or

the security, trade, and organizational relations among nations. These networks have proven

quite influential. For instance, 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 in the world polity, Schofer

(2003:751) concluded that “as ‘world society’ became structured in concrete international

associations after 1945, direct ties among nations mattered somewhat less.” Horizontal ties

among nation-states are increasingly supplemented by vertical ties between states and

international organizations. These organizational linkages serve as “receptor sites” (Frank,

Hironaka, and Schofer 2000: 96) that “receive, decode, and transmit signals from world society

to national actors.” They also represent network nodes that connect different countries to one

another (Hughes, Peterson, Harrison, and Paxton 2009; Torfason and Ingram 2010), thus

providing a new “second-order” form of interstate linkage.

Although much recent work has focused on nongovernmental or “world society” organizations

(Boli and Thomas 1999), intergovernmental organizations—world polity institutions par

excellence—remain important purveyors of world culture. In a recent study, Torfason and

Ingram (2010:356) concluded that “the network forged between states through their joint

memberships in intergovernmental organizations” was a primary conduit for the diffusion of

democratic norms and institutions. What mattered in this case were not only the kinds of

organization-to-country ties most often emphasized by global institutionalist scholars (i.e., how

many organizational memberships a country has), but also the bilateral country-to-country ties

that occur within the structural and interpretive frameworks provided by intergovernmental

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organizations. Organizational memberships influence countries directly, but they also provide

formal arenas for interstate communication and diffusion (see also Hughes, Peterson, Harrison,

and Paxton 2009).

Interpersonal linkages also promote diffusion. Clark and Hall (2011:871) argue that international

migration and telecommunications are “an important sector of the world polity.” Migrants, they

contend, carry world-cultural norms and scripts across national borders. Cross-national telephone

traffic, too, serves as an important conduit for diffusion. I suggest, however, that these kinds of

informal networks are best described as forming part of world society, rather than the world

polity. Migration and telephone conversations belong to the more private, civil society

dimensions of the global institutional system, rather than to the system’s more statist elements.

Indeed, the state’s growing inability to curb these cross-border movements of people and ideas is

often regarded as an indicator of diminished state sovereignty in a globalizing world (Krasner

1999).

Akin to the effect of migration patterns, Tsutsui and Wotipka (2004) found that tourist flows

positively influenced citizens’ level of involvement in human rights INGOs by diffusing human

rights norms and connecting domestic publics with external activists. In this particular case,

international travel, nongovernmental organizations, and transnational advocacy networks

combined to form a non-statist nexus of the world society.

Quite apart from the importance of interstate, organizational, and interpersonal networks to

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 (Strang and

Meyer 1993) that they no longer depend on nodal linkages for their diffusion and adoption. In

Durkheimian fashion (Meyer 2009), world-cultural influences become increasingly diffuse and

indirect. Policies and practices are assimilated by states (and other social actors) as if by osmosis

through acculturative processes, in addition to the more direct mechanisms of socialization and

coercion (Goodman and Jinks 2004). The global institutional 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 the

identities, structures, and purposes of social actors in highly disembedded fashion (Meyer, Boli,

et al. 1997).

Diffuse effects of this sort abound. They help explain, among other things, the dramatic increases

in school enrollments we witness among countries without mandatory attendance laws (Ramirez

and Boli 1987); the rapid postwar expansion of higher education enrollments via the processes of

global democratization, scientization, and structuration, net of direct national-level

characteristics and effects (Schofer and Meyer 2005); the “drift” toward improved environmental

outcomes in the absence of formal policy changes designed to protect the environment (Schofer

and Hironaka 2005); the higher wages for nonunionized workers in regions and industries with

strong unions (Western and Rosenfeld 2011); the uptick in reports of rape in countries that have

not undertaken rape-law reforms (Frank, Hardinge, and Wosick-Correa 2009); and the positive

effect of international human rights treaties among non-ratifying countries (Cole 2012a). The

shift is from a world polity structured primarily by interstate linkages and toward a world society

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in which diffuse cultural and multifaceted associational dynamics figure much more

prominently.

Toward an Explicit Conceptual and Operational Distinction

If Tocqueville’s observations about nineteenth-century America have provided a useful

touchstone in describing the basic contours of contemporary world society, I suggest that T. H.

Marshall’s inquiry into the nature of citizenship offers an illuminating way to think about the

coexistence of the world polity and society. Marshall ([1950] 1992) grappled with the tension

between the legal equality and socioeconomic inequality of citizens. In much the same way,

contemporary nation-states are constituted as juridically equal actors despite gross economic

inequalities and widespread variation in their structural capacities (Jackson and Rosberg 1982;

McNeely 1995; Krasner 1999; Hironaka 2005). The world polity is premised on the (fictitious)

principle of sovereign equality among recognized states. Not all countries, of course, are created

equal, even with respect to legal or juridical status. Although the United Nations functions as a

“membership club” for nominally equal states (McNeely 1995)—in much the same way that

citizenship serves as a membership club for nominally equal citizens (Brubaker 1992)—some

countries (e.g., permanent Security Council members) enjoy a privileged “primus-inter-pares”

status. Still, the fiction endures.

The Marshallian analogy can also be extended to highlight diachronic changes in the

geographical scope and organizing principles of the global institutional system. Much as

citizenship was extended to subpopulations—men without property, women, minorities—

incrementally, so that today citizenship is a uniform status that extends to all members in a

polity, membership in the world polity was originally restricted in all but a few exceptional cases

to European states but has since been extended to countries with starkly disparate cultural

traditions and levels of economic development. Membership in the polity, before World War II,

was predicated on the notion of “civilization.” According to Keal (2003:103), prominent

international jurists such as Oppenheim and Westlake 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.” 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 World War II. Sovereign equality, not civilizational purity, is the postwar

polity’s organizing principle. Just as the correlation between whiteness and citizenship status

within Western nations declined over time, so too did the correlation between whiteness and

sovereign statehood within the world polity (Cairns 2000:41). But in neither case—for citizens or

for states—did the extension of 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 a host of juridically equal but structurally weak states plagued

by civil war (Jackson and Rosberg 1982; Hironaka 2005).

Beckfield’s (2003) analysis of inequality in the density of countries’ linkages to international

organizations is apposite in this context. Beckfield found that cross-national variability in

international nongovernmental organization (INGO) ties greatly eclipses variability in

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intergovernmental organization (IGO) memberships. “States,” that is, “are much more evenly

integrated into IGOs than are the societies in INGOs” (Beckfield 2003:418). He concluded that

wealthy, Western, and “core” states are tied to far more INGOs vis-à-vis their counterparts in

poor, non-Western, and peripheral states. But these economic and civilizational factors are much

less important with respect to the number of states’ IGO memberships. He draws several

conclusions from his findings (Beckfield 2003:418). Consistent with the global institutionalist

emphasis on isomorphic processes, he posits that “there may be less inequality in IGO ties than

in INGO ties because states resemble each other more than do societies.” State institutions are

structurally (and ritualistically) similar, but formal institutions are often “decoupled” from on-

the-ground realities. He also offers a more realist interpretation: “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 their powerful

counterparts.

I offer an alternative interpretation. Inequality in IGO ties is relatively low not only because

states are structurally isomorphic, as Beckfield suggests, but also because they are constituted as

(formally) equal members of the international community. Status equality, in turn, translates into

greater levels of equality in the density of states’ organizational ties within the world polity.

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. This

distinction is often implicit is the empirical literature, as illustrated by several recent studies of

the international human rights regime. In their analysis of human rights treaty ratification,

Wotipka and Tsutsui (2008:742) include 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.” In a related analysis of human rights

organizations, Tsutsui and Wotipka (2004:589) “attempt to sort out the different roles of inter-

governmental and nongovernmental organizations in global political processes. Global human

rights ideas pose a threat to governmental actors because they tend to constrain state behavior in

domestic political affairs. Nongovernmental actors, on the other hand, are less concerned about

state sovereignty.” IGOs, in other words, represent the interests of states, whereas INGOs

represent societal interests.

This argument echoes Boyle and Thompson’s (2001) analysis of individual abuse claims

submitted to the European Commission on Human Rights. They found that the number of claims

emanating from a country increased as the number of 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” (p. 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” (p. 329) to the principle of state sovereignty.

Because human rights norms pose a fundamental challenge to state sovereignty—namely, the

ability of states to exclude external actors and influences from internal affairs (Krasner 1999)—

IGOs are associated with lower rates of individual claims making.

11

Despite their different roles and functions in the global institutional system, IGOs and INGOs

frequently belong to the same extended networks. Human rights treaties that authorize

individuals to petition human rights bodies for redress of grievances (Boyle and Thompson 2001;

Cole 2006) offer a telling example. Here, a treaty regime (to which only states can belong)

creates an oversight committee (an IGO) to receive complaints from individuals (acting

independently of and against their respective nation-states) who are often assisted by advocacy

groups (such as INGOs) that are themselves linked (via transnational activist networks) to

similar organizations around the world. In this fashion, the world polity and society have become

highly interpenetrated over time.

In another example of interpenetration, the United Nations has formalized the participation of

civil society organizations from its inception. Article 71 of the U.N. Charter provides that the

Economic and Social Council “may make suitable arrangements for consultation with non-

governmental organizations which are concerned with matters within its competence.” As of

September 2010, nearly 2,400 nongovernmental organizations enjoy consultative status in the

United Nations.6 Through this mechanism, world society organizations participate actively in the

world polity’s most prominent IGO.

Additional Considerations on Operationalization

How might analysts begin to operationalize the distinction between the world polity and society

in empirical research? 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. Institutionalists often neglect to link these concepts to their respective

operational measures—IGOs as measuring the impact of the world polity, and INGOs as tapping

the influence of 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/society.

Even more problematically, they sometimes combine the two measures into a single index (e.g.,

Cole 2005; Schofer and Hironaka 2005; Frank, Hironaka, and Schofer 2000). I suggest that these

measures be kept distinct, and that they be interpreted as tapping different dimensions of the

global institutional system.7

Recent research shows, for example, that states’ participation in the world polity via IGO

memberships reduces levels of political mobilization and violence among ethnic groups, whereas

INGO linkages serve to exacerbate inter-ethnic conflict (Olzak 2006; Koenig and Dierkes 2011).

Here, then, is a case where intergovernmental (i.e., statist) and nongovernmental (i.e., societal)

organizations exert contradictory effects on a given outcome.

6 http://esango.un.org/paperless/reports/E2010INF4.pdf (accessed December 19, 2011).

7 As noted previously, Beckfield (2003) concluded that core countries and Western nations belong to significantly

more INGOs than do their economically peripheral and non-Western counterparts. To capture the unique “world

society” influence of INGO linkages, it may be necessary to residualize country-level INGO memberships by

partialling out the effects of economic development, world-systems status, and civilizational membership (see, e.g.,

Cole 2012b).

12

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 and networks, just as dependence networks, interstate

linkages, and diplomatic exchanges (Goodliffe and Hawkins 2009; Slaughter 2004; Torfason and

Ingram 2010) currently tap elements of world polity integration. All that remains is to make

these dimensions conceptually and theoretically explicit.

In addition to these standard measures, 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, which

is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss.8 The political component is a reasonable measure of

a state’s embeddedness in world polity: it indexes IGO memberships, participation in U.N.

Security Council missions, ratification of international treaties, and the number of embassies in a

country. Finally, the social component includes measures of interpersonal contact (e.g.,

telephone traffic, international tourism, foreign population) and cultural proximity (number of

McDonald’s franchises, number of Ikea stores, and trade in books). This index overlaps

substantially with global institutionalist understandings of world society.9

Table 1 presents correlations among the KOF economic, social, and political globalization

indices and several other measures: INGO linkages, IGO memberships, GDP per capita, and a

dummy variable for Western countries. As with Beckfield’s (2003) analysis of IGO and INGO

ties, aggregate economic wealth correlates more or less strongly with the various dimensions of

globalization. Of the three globalization indices, the social dimension is highly correlated with

GDP per capita (r = .760), followed by economic globalization (r = .589) and political

globalization (r = .486). 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 also more dominant in INGOs

than in IGOs (Beckfield 2003). INGO linkages correlate with GDP per capita 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.

These correlations suggest that the social globalization index and INGO linkages tap a common

underlying dimension—world society embeddedness—whereas the political globalization index

and IGO memberships correspond to a different dimension—world polity integration. Indeed,

8 The economic globalization index comprises a variety of measures on trade, foreign direct investment, taxes,

import barriers, and the like. This index would allow researchers to address world-systems–like dynamics alongside

global institutional processes transpiring in the world polity and society. 9 Admittedly, the cultural proximity dimension corresponds more closely with world society’s expressive as

opposed to constitutive dimensions (Meyer, Boli, and Thomas 1987; Jepperson and Swidler 1994; Meyer 1999; Boli

and Lechner 2001). Culture, in the global institutionalist sense, is fundamentally constitutive: it “is less a set of

values and norms, and more a set of cognitive models defining the nature, purpose, resources, technologies, controls,

and sovereignty of the proper nation-state” (Meyer 1999:123). Sewell (1992) invokes the example of language to

elucidate the distinction. Rules of grammar and syntax form the constitutive elements of language (langue), whereas

the poetry, prose, and spontaneous speech created under the rubric of those rules (parole) is quintessentially

expressive. People routinely speak without contemplating or even comprehending formal grammatical or syntactical

rules, which illustrates the often tacit and taken-for-granted nature of constitutive culture.

13

the correlations of social globalization with INGOs and political globalization with IGOs are

quite strong (r = .701 for the former and .785 for the latter).10

Future work in the world polity/

society domain would do well to link their operational measures more explicitly to different

conceptual dimensions of the global institutional system.

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, particularly since World War II, as well as

its effects on national societies. The approach is theoretically sophisticated and empirically

rigorous. Nevertheless, I have argued 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 important purposes. First and foremost, it would facilitate the

identification of different causal mechanisms at work in the global institutional system. Research

demonstrates that countries have become increasingly isomorphic over time with respect to

formal policies and structures. Analysts are also beginning to 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 (whether 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 help elucidate tensions within the global institutional

system. Under what conditions do the statist and non-statist dimensions of this system reinforce

one another? When—and why—do they work at cross-purposes? The complex relationship

between state sovereignty and human rights is one prominent example of the tension between

polity and society. Sovereignty is, of course, a property of national states and a Grundnorm of

the world polity. Human rights principles, in contrast, are designed 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—have deftly marshaled these principles to criticize and delegitimate abuses

perpetrated by states. At the same time, in the absence of a single, overarching, integrated world

state, human rights continue to depend on national states for their protection and implementation.

Highlighting conceptual and substantive differences between the world polity and world society

can enable researchers to gain traction in explaining these kinds of dialectical dynamics.

Just as important, the world polity/society distinction can nurture a more historically attuned

rendition of global institutionalism. With very few exceptions, work in this tradition has focused

overwhelmingly on the post-World War II 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

10

The strong correlation between political globalization and IGO memberships makes sense, given that IGO

memberships contribute approximately one-fourth of the variation in the KOF political index (Dreher 2006).

14

century. It is also true, however, that the global institutional system has become less resolutely

statist during the postwar era: global civil society has thickened and strengthened tremendously

over the past five or six decades (Boli and Thomas 1999; Schofer 2003). Delineating between the

more statist and societal dimensions of the world system can give us a better foundation for

understanding how it emerged and has transformed over time.

Here, then, is a case in which greater conceptual specificity has the potential to yield new

theoretical insights without imposing onerous methodological burdens. Indeed, 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.

15

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Humanities database.

Figure 1.

Trends in the use of “world polity” and “world society” in scholarly work, 1980-2010

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Table 1. Correlations among different dimensions of globalization

GDP

per

capita

Western

country

INGO

linkages

IGO

member-

ships

Economic

globaliz-

ation

Social

globaliz-

ation

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