Supranational Delegation and the Politics of Structural Design: A Comparative Analysis of Regional Integration Organizations

By utilizing the literature on “the politics of structural design”, I propose and test a hypothesis that identifies the domestic political conditions under which delegation of political authority to supranational institutions are most likely. The key tenet of the this literature is that delegation is a means to protect policies from future perturbation and thus the underlying motivation for delegation is not to economize on transaction costs, but to gain an upper hand in the world of political uncertainty. The direct corollary of this reasoning is that the granted authority to an agent is a function of the degree of political competition and preference divergence among the political actors. Applying this reasoning to the case of supranational delegation, I hypothesize that the more authority is likely to be granted to the supranational institutions, the more competitive political actors and the more divergent their policy preferences. I test this hypothesis against the data on regional integration organizations, which provides support to the hypothesis.