Case Selection and Research Methods for a Comparative Analysis of Developing Regions

ASEAN, MERCOSUR, and SADC are arguably the most developed regional organisations on their continents. The member states of other regional organisations—like the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the Andean Community, or the Common Market of East and Southern Africa—are economically less developed on average, and the respective regions are less integrated. This means that our cases are not only the most important ones in political terms, but that they are also relatively unlikely cases for our hypotheses: If the extra-regional logic explains the ups and downs of regional integration in relatively well-developed regions, we can be confident that it is even more important in less-developed regions where the gains from intraregional economic interdependence are even lower. Besides, our cases differ in respect to many other variables, which may compete with our hypotheses for the explanation of regional integration in the developing world. The 3 regions are very different in cultural terms (MERCOSUR is dominated by Catholicism only, whereas ASEAN is split between Buddhism, Catholicism and Islam), in political terms (MERCOSUR consists only of presidential democracies, whereas the other 2 regions also include authoritarian or failed states), and in the number of member states (only 5 in MERCOSUR, but 15 in SADC). If our hypotheses hold true in such a heterogeneous sample, we gain confidence in its ability to describe a general phenomenon. The comparison of the three world regions is accompanied by in-case comparisons of regional cooperation and defection. Here, only the variable of interest—the extra-regional privileges of the regional powers—differs between the observations.