World Polity Matters: Another Look at the Rise of the Nation-State across the World, 1816 to 2001

Did the nation-state spread due to global diffusion? Wimmer and Feinstein's 2010 ASR article concludes that there are no world polity influences on the rise of the nation-state; rather, the spread of the nation-state was driven by proximate and contextual political factors situated at the local and regional levels, in line with historical institutionalist arguments. Here, after arguing that Wimmer and Feinstein misspecify the historical domain of the world polity theory, we reanalyze their data and find that world polity has played a consistent role in the global rise of the nation-state since WWII. Specifically, global diffusion processes complement the more local and regional varieties of causal processes stressed by historical institutionalist theorists. We measure the institutionalization of world polity with inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and processes through which potential nation-states mimic existing nation-states. IGO membership and existing nation-states show positive significance in the post-1945 period, and all three measures significantly facilitate nation-state creation for 1953 to 2001, the period for which INGO data are available. Results affirm the importance of state legitimacy secured by adapting the global model of the nation-state.