Regional Organizations‘ Competencies (ROCO) Database, version 2.0

The Regional Organizations’ (ROCO) databases have been developed as part of the research project “Towards an Increasing Regionalization of International Politics? Comparing the Development of External and Internal Competencies of Regional Organizations over Time”, which was funded by the Fritz-Thyssen-Foundation (grant number Az.10.16.1012IB). The update version 2.0 was implemented with funding from the German Research Council, as part of the research project “Overlapping Regionalism in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe Compared” (grant number PA 1257/7-1; 421167407) The ROCO datasets 2.0 provide information on 73 regional international organizations (RIOs) from 1945 to 2020 and the policy competencies which are specified in the RIOs’ primary law documents. While the project’s primary focus is on external policy competencies of RIOs, the dataset entails information about both internal and external policy competencies. The research questions guiding the development of the datasets are: how have RIOs’ internal and external policy mandates change over time? This codebook provides an overview of the datasets. In the following first part, the codebook introduces the datasets, describes the included cases and information, clarifies the coding procedure and coding decisions, and explains how to use the datasets. The second part of the codebook provides an alphabetical list of all variables in the databases, while the variables are described in detail in part 3, ordered after categories.