Essays on Domestic Politics of International Disputes and Cooperation

Abstract

The three essays that comprise this dissertation examine how domestic politics affect international disputes and cooperation. The first chapter examines dispute escalation at the WTO, presenting a theory of informational lobbying by firms for trade liberalization, not through political contributions, but instead through contributions to the litigation process. In this “litigation for sale” model, firms signal information about the strength and value of potential cases, and the government screens cases based on firms’ signals. The model suggests that firm participation increases a states’ ability to efficiently pursue the removal of trade barriers and helps explain the unusually high success rate for complainants in WTO disputes. The second chapter recognizes that conventional wisdom assumes that leaders who compromise lose the respect of their constituents and damage their reputations, which in turn undermines the prospects for peace and security. I present research that challenges this assumption and tests when and how leaders can negotiate compromises and avoid paying domestic costs. I argue that leaders avoid audience costs by exercising “proposal power” and initiating compromises. These contributions suggest that leaders who exercise proposal power have significant flexibility to negotiate compromise settlements. The third chapter of my dissertation engages a literature that argues one way governments can credibly signal their intentions in foreign policy crises is by creating domestic audience costs. This chapter argues that there are actually two logics of audience costs: audiences can punish leaders both for being inconsistent, and for threatening to use force in the first place. We employ an experiment that disentangles these two rationales, and turn to a series of dispositional characteristics from political psychology to bring the audience into audience cost theory. Our results suggest that traditional audience cost experiments may overestimate how much people care about inconsistency, and that the logic of audience costs (and the implications for crisis bargaining) varies considerably with the leader’s constituency.