Empirical verification of the concept of regional leadership on the example of rising powers

Abstract

In the domestic and foreign scientific literature, a consensus has appeared on the identification of the rising state’s status as a regional power. Most often, the BRICS countries are being identified as rising states. In recent years, publications identified the MIKTA countries as rising middle powers that already have the status of regional powers or tend to be such. The purpose of the article is to determine whether participation in the BRICS and MIKTA formats allows states to strengthen their regional leadership or claim regional leadership. As a part of the empirical study the regional leadership of the BRICS and MIKTA states, on the one hand, is being considered from the point of assessing the material power attributes throughout the use of the Composite Index of National Capability; оn the other hand, we proceed from a constructivist approach to the leadership concept. This approach allows us to consider leadership as a constructed category depending on the recognition by powers of a different order as belonging to the region, the legitimacy of the regional leader status for one or another state of the BRICS and MIKTA. Methodologically we proceed from the fact that the category of legitimacy can be operationalized by identifying the cohesion of voting in the UN General Assembly of the BRICS and MIKTA states with the states belonging to their regions. The top numbers of the similarity index average value indicate the recognition of the regional leadership of the BRICS and MIKTA member states by the follower states belonging to their regions. At the level of the hypothesis, it is expected that the average values of the similarity index, firstly, will be equal for the BRICS countries and the MIKTA countries, and secondly, they will be set to top values. Thus, this article is to determine the correlation between the resource endowment of the state’s regional leadership and the legitimacy of such leadership.