Introduction

Abstract

To present several different regional organizations in a common framework, this book uses a simplified and modified version of the structural-functional approach of Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell that was developed for the comparative study of the political institutions of nation-states.¹ Although the regional systems to be examined in this book are underdeveloped in comparison with the elaborate governing structures found in modern nation-states, the same processes of political interaction analyzed in the Almond and Powell framework can be identified and studied with regard to these regional systems. The processes examined in the essays collected here are interest articulation and aggregation, socialization, rule-making, and rule-adjudication.²