How does organizational overlap between international organizations (IOs) shape the authority of its constituent units? IOs have become ubiquitous in international politics, and this ubiquity is reflected in the enormous growth of both their institutional authority and institutional overlap between them. Even though these two developments have evolved concurrently and there are good reasons to believe that they are related, extant research examines them largely in isolation. This paper presents an investigation of the relationships between these two phenomena in the context of the African regional organizational complex (ROC), the densest ROC in the world. To do so, we first draw on the literature on organizational ecology to develop three conjectures about the effect of IO overlap on IO authority, labeled the ratcheting up, dampening, and polarization effects. Second, we use recently developed measures of the two core concepts – authority and organizational overlap – and a new data set of a large number of African IOs to present a descriptive analysis of cross-sectional and temporal variation of the African ROC. Third, we use statistical tools to examine the effects of overlap on authority in this sample. The preliminary results provide ample support for the dampening effect.
