Mechanisms, process and the study of international institutions

The past decade has seen a sustained move by students of international institutions and organizations to viewing their subject matter as independent variables affecting state interests and policy. Conceptually, this has put a premium on identifying the mechanisms connecting institutions to states; methodologically, there has been a growing concern with measuring process. In this paper, I survey empirical applications where international institutions are claimed to be influencing state-level action through various processes and mechanisms. The move to process and to the method of process tracing has been salutary, I argue, producing rich and analytically rigorous studies that demonstrate the multiple roles - good and bad - institutions play in global politics. At the same time, challenges remain. In terms of design, scholars often fail to address the problem of equifinality - where multiple causal pathways may lead to the same outcome - and instead conduct process tracing only on their preferred argument. Theoretically, the power and generalizability of arguments about institutions seem to decrease as the focus shifts to process. Finally, the potential for process tracing to help scholars produce integrative frameworks about international institutions - combining insights from different social-theoretic toolkits - remains unfulfilled.