CBEES Advanced Seminar (Co-organised with the Department of Political Science) with Jonas Tallberg, Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Stockholm Center on Global Governance, Stockholm University.

Speaker: Jonas Tallberg, Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Stockholm Center on Global Governance, Stockholm University.

Discussant: Edward Lemon, Research Assistant Professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University, Washington DC, and President of the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs.

Chair: Olena Podolian, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University.

Abstract: Jonas Tallberg will introduce his ERC Advanced Grant project "Democracy, Autocracy, and International Cooperation," as well as present a recent paper from this project. Recent events in world politics suggest that international cooperation is becoming increasingly polarized between democracies and autocracies. Yet, so far, research offers little insight into the extent of this phenomenon and the factors that might be driving it. This paper provides a first comprehensive and systematic analysis of regime-based clustering in international organizations (IOs). Theoretically, it develops a novel argument of regime sorting, explaining why states seek cooperation with others of the same regime type. Empirically, it maps and explains regime-based clustering in the full population of IOs between 1925 and 2020. The paper finds that clustering among democracies and autocracies has expanded over time, and that states joining IOs with like regimes is a key factor driving these patterns, also when controlling for economic interdependence, geopolitical alignment, and geographical proximity. The paper suggests that international relations theory has underestimated the importance of regime type for how states organize in world politics. 

Jonas Tallberg is Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University and Co-Director of the Stockholm Center on Global Governance – a center of excellence funded by the Swedish Research Council. His primary research interests are global governance and European Union politics. He currently directs the research project Democracy, Autocracy, and International Cooperation (DemCoop), funded by the European Research Council, the Swedish Research Council, and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, as well as the research project The Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence (GGAI), funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. From 2016 to 2021, he directed the research program Legitimacy in Global Governance (LegGov).