Power and Relation in the World Polity: The INGO Network Country Score, 1978-1998

World polity theory is explicitly relational, implying a global network structure that exists outside of the nation-state. And world polity theory increasingly acknowledges power – that some states and regions are dominant in the international field. But current world polity measures of international nongovernmental organizations do not adequately incorporate either networks or power, leading to a mismatch between theory and measurement. In this article, we draw upon world polity, world system and social networks theories to inform the development of a new over-time measure of country-level connectedness to the world polity, which we label the “INGO Network Country Score.” This measure scores countries by their centrality in the world country-INGO network. We compare our newly-proposed INGO Network Country Score to the traditional measure (country-level raw counts of INGO memberships) and demonstrate striking differences. Our network-based measure shows less inequality among Western countries than the traditional measure, and greater inequality between the West and the rest of the world. Looking over time, we draw three further implications from our new measure. First, there is evidence of inequality in network centrality in the world polity at all time points. Second, regional inequalities persist. Third, connections in the world polity are not exponentially increasing, as previously hypothesized. An added benefit of the analysis is our presentation of the first visual representation of country connections through INGOs.