The New Interdependence

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Domestic Institutions Beyond the Nation State: Charting the New Interdependence Approach (PDF)

Tim Büthe and Walter Mattli. The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011, 301pp.

Elliot Posner. The Origins of Europe’s New Stock Markets. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univer sity Press, 2009, 240pp.

Kal Raustiala. Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 313pp.

Abstract: What is the relationship between domestic and international politics in a world of economic interdependence? This essay discusses and organizes an emerging body of scholarship, which we label the new interdependence a pproach, addressing how transnational interactions shape domestic institutions and global politics in a world of economic interdependence. This literature makes three important contributions.

First, it examine s how domestic institutions affect the ability of political actors to construct the rules and norms governing interdependent relations and thus offer a source of asymmetric power. Second, it explores how interdependence alters domestic political institutions through processes of diffusion, transgovernmental coordination and extraterritorial application and in turn change s the national institutions med iating internal debates on globalization. Third, it studies the shifting boundaries of political contestation through which sub state actors affect decision making in foreign jurisdictions.

Given the importance of institutional change to the new interdependence agenda, we suggest several instances where historical institutionalist tools might be exploited to address these transnational dynamics, in particular mechanisms of cross national sequencing and sub state actor change strategies. As globalization continues, it will be ever more difficult to examine national trajectories of institutional change in isolation from each other. Equally, it will be difficult to understand international institutions without paying attention to the ways in which they both transform and are transformed by domestic institutional politics. While not yet cohering as a single voice, we believe the new interdependence approach offers an innovative agenda that holds tremendous promise for both comparative and International Relations research.