Regime type and bilateral treaty formalization: do too many cooks spoil the soup?

Regime Type and Bilateral Treaty Formalization: Do Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup?

Ana Carolina Garriga
Department of Political Science
University of Pittsburgh
Journal of Conflict Resolution [Acceptance date: May 2009]

Abstract. How does domestic regime type affect bilateral cooperation, and one of its most visible manifestations, bilateral treaties? This paper explains how domesticpolitical regime affects bilateral cooperation and, contrary to the expectations of some scholars, why autocracies should be expected to be more likely than democracies to enter into bilateral treaties. If the preferences of a pair of states are not identical, the sets of agreements that each party would consent to (win-sets) need to overlap for a bilateral treaty to be acceptable. Becauseadditional domestic constraints reduce the size of a country’s win-set, autocracies should have broader win-sets than democracies. Therefore, autocratic dyads should be more likely to formalize bilateral treaties than other pairs of states. Based on an original dataset, I present empirical evidence showing that pairs of autocracies are more likely than other pairs of states to enter into agreementsformalizing bilateral cooperation. Keywords: regime type; domestic constraints; bilateral bargaining; treaties; two-level games.

Acknowledgments: I am especially grateful to David Bearce and Brian J. Phillips for commenting on several drafts of this paper. I also thank Barry Ames, Ramiro Berardo, Kate Floros, Bill Keech, Scott Morgenstern, Aníbal Pérez Liñán, the members of the World PoliticsWorkshop of the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. All replication materials are posted at http://jcr.sagepub.com/. The data and additional tables are posted at http://sites.google.com/site/carogarriga/.

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How does domestic regime type affect bilateral cooperation, and one of its most visible manifestations,bilateral treaties? The literature has contradictory expectations regarding the impact of a country’s regime type on cooperation. Whereas some scholars posit a “democratic difference” in international relations, expecting democracies to be more likely than autocracies to cooperate and to enter into agreements, other studies suggest that democratic institutions do not necessarily encourage agreementsthat formalize cooperation. Furthermore, although empirical evidence suggests that democracies are more likely than autocracies to sign multilateral treaties (for example, Mansfield and Reinhardt 2003:858), the available evidence on bilateral treaties puzzles some scholars as “counter-intuitive” because autocracies seem to sign more treaties than democracies in the noneconomic realm, but fewer inthe economic sphere (Remmer 1998:39). Still, the relationship between regime type and bilateral treaties remains unclear. This paper explains how domestic political regime affects bilateral cooperation and, contrary to the expectations of some scholars, why autocracies should be expected to enter into bilateral treaties more often than democracies. Based on an original dataset, I present empiricalevidence showing that pairs of autocracies are more likely than other pairs of states to enter in agreements formalizing bilateral cooperation. In doing so, this paper contributes to the literature in several ways. First, this paper advances a theory about the impact of regime type on bilateral cooperation. To my knowledge, whereas the impact of domestic regime type has been studied in the contextof multilateral cooperation (for example, in Mansfield, Milner and Rosendorff 2002; Mansfield and Pevehouse 2006; Vreeland 2008), there are no large-N studies examining the effects of regime type on bilateral cooperation. Second, although this paper draws on the literature on international bargaining, it makes a threefold contribution to that body of research by focusing on the likelihood of...