UC Riverside

The modern system of global governance is comprised of a hegemonic cycle, a network of state-IGO affiliations, and the interstate system that derives its continuity from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. To empirically capture multiple dimensions of each of these three elements of global governance, this research examines the emergence and development of three separate networks, these being networks of international trade, foreign aid, and IGO membership since the establishment of the League of Nations. Network analysis was performed on matrices for the period where data are available, rendering the densities, centralities, and hierarchical structures of these networks and their respective hegemons. These values were subsequently incorporated into an attribute dataset of established, non-network measures of global governance—among them, a hegemon’s military budget, and the ratio of world imports to world GDP—in an effort to assess measures of autocorrelation, cross-correlation, and conduct other time-series analysis, including Prais-Winsten regressions. Several relationships were identified using bivariate and partial cross-correlation coefficients, though there is little uniformity in them from which to draw a singular narrative.