A Rationalist-Institutionalist Explanation of Endogenous Regional Integration

What is at the basis of regional integration and what are the processes that drive integration? Why do integration processes develop faster in some issue areas than in others? These questions are at the heart of our own work, just as they are the driving concerns of Ernst Haas’s version of neofunctionalism. While we, unlike Haas, emphasize endogenous processes of institutional change based on bargaining processes in a particular institutional context, rather than exogenously driven processes of technical needs and spillover, we believe that there is important overlap between our approach and Haas’s, as well as areas of disagreement. By exploring these areas of overlap in this article, we hope – by focusing on bargaining processes – to empirically illustrate on the one hand how our approach may help to answer questions that Haas’s version of neofunctionalism had difficulties with, and on the other how Haas’s emphasis on epistemic factors can alleviate some of the blind spots in our own perspective.

Henry Farrell and Adrienne Hèritier (2005), “A Rationalist-Institutionalist Explanation of Endogenous Regional Integration,” Journal of European Public Policy 12, 2:273-290.

Access the full article here

Other Writing:

Essay

“The “Intellectual Dark Web,” Explained: What Jordan Peterson Has in Common with the Alt-Right”

Bari Weiss, an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times, created a stir this week with a long article on a group that calls itself the “Intellectual Dark Web.” The coinage referred to a loose collective of intellectuals and media personalities who believe they are “locked out” of mainstream media, in Weiss’s words, ...
Read Article
Essay

How Facebook Stymies Social Science

What exactly was the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 election campaign? How widespread was its infiltration of social media? And how much influence did its propaganda have on public opinion and voter behavior? Scholars are only now starting to tackle those questions. But to answer them, academics need data — and getting that ...
Read Article