The Impact of Leadership Turnover and Regime Type on the Evolution and Maintenance of International Cooperation

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

In an age of globalization, interactions between states are increasingly common. Nations cooperate on many dimensions. For instance, they participate in international agreements, they invest in each other economies (Foreign Direct Investment) and the lend each other money (sovereign debt). Yet, all nations do not participate equally. Although the world appears increasingly cooperative, the underlying anarchic nature of the international system remains unchanged and no overarching authority exists to enforce agreements. Therefore, the ability to cooperate relies upon trust between nations. For instance, nations will only lend to a foreign state if they trust it to repay its debts. Traditional liberal theory suggests nations enforce cooperation by conditioning future behavior upon current interactions; for instance, by refusing to make future loans to a country unless it repays debts today. Through the use of such reciprocal punishment strategies, liberal theory explains why cooperation is possible, but it fails to account for the great variance in the level of cooperation between states. The Principal Investigators propose regime type and the turnover of leaders accounts for these differences. The Principal Investigators propose a theory of leader specific punishments in which the responsible leader, not the nation she represents, is held accountable for a breakdown in cooperation. By refusing to cooperate with this leader in the future, foreign nations create an incentive for the citizenry to remove their leader and replace her with a new leader. Since foreign nations have no grudge against the new leader, this restores cooperation between states. This argument suggests important features in the pattern of cooperation between states. First, the turnover of leaders refreshes soured relations between states, as the restoration of relations between Yugoslavia and western states following the removal of Slobodan Milosevic illustrates. Second, regime type affects the extent to which regimes can cooperate. Regime type determines the ease of leader removal. In autocratic regimes, where the cost of replacing a leader is typically high, the benefits of restoring international cooperation are unlikely to compensate citizens for the costs of deposing their leader. Leaders in such systems can violate international agreements with impunity. In democratic systems replacing leaders is much easier. As such, the citizens of democracies can restore halted international cooperation by simply replacing their leader. Democratic leaders who violate international agreements or norms of cooperation risk losing their jobs. This makes them more likely to honor their commitments and makes them more trustworthy. The Principal Investigators propose testing how regime type and leadership turnover affects relations between states in a variety of contexts. Events data, such as COPDAB, allow the construct of indices of cooperation between states. Using such indices the Principal Investigators intend to study how one state reacts to the behavior of another and how these relations are moderated by domestic political institutions and leadership tenure. The Principal Investigators also propose examining dyadic trade flows, sovereign debt, foreign direct investment and the termination of sanctions. In addition to compiling numerous existing data sources, the proposed empirical research requires substantial updating of leaders data (Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson 1995).