The Theory of Hegemonic Stability and Changes in International Economic Regimes, 1967–1977

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The concept of international regime can be relatively narrow and precise or quite elastic. Regimes in the narrow sense are defined by explicit rules, usually agreed to by governments at international conferences and often associated with formal international organizations. The International Telecommunications Union, for instance, supervises rules governing radio broadcasting. The concept of international regime enables a coherent analysis of changes in world politics. The search for theoretical completeness would therefore lead to descriptive anarchy: investigation of domestic political reasons for international regime change could easily lead to an increasingly diffuse set of ad hoc observations about particular cases. A parsimonious theory of international regime change has recently been developed by a number of authors, notably Charles Kindleberger, Robert Gilpin, and Stephen Krasner. The hegemonic stability thesis is a power-as-resources theory, which attempts to link tangible state capabilities to behavior.