Preparing the Ground

TL;DR: The book's empirical strategy involves operationalizing institutional topologies as social networks to map the topologies underlying international regime complexes.

Abstract: Abstract This chapter introduces the book’s general empirical strategy by laying out the network-based operationalization of institutional topologies, justifying the case selection, and elaborating on the observable implications that follow from the hypotheses developed in the previous chapter. The first section develops a conceptualization of institutional topologies underlying regime complexes. Drawing on concepts from social network analysis, it proposes to capture the (de-) centralization of institutional topologies from an interinstitutional, hence relation, perspective. To map the topologies underlying international regime complexes, the chapter proposes a conceptualization of them as social networks structured by the interaction of their constitutive actors, institutions, and states.