Domestic Politics and International Bargaining Open Access
Park, Yeon Kyung G. (Summer 2019)
Published
Abstract
This dissertation explores how domestic politics affects the international bargaining decisions of leaders and their foreign counterparts. The field of international relations often assumes that a leader's public commitment helps states overcome asymmetric information about each other's resolves and help them avoid unnecessary conflict. This hinges on the assumption that citizens dislike broken promises and always punish a leader if (s)he reneges on a public commitment. Relaxing this assumption, the dissertation develops a formal model that fully specifies when citizens politically punish their leader and when this punishment makes the leader fulfill his or her public statement. Citizens' evaluation of their leader is a function of four factors: their dislike for their leader's inconsistency between words and actions, benefits from a bargaining outcome, issue complexity, and issue salience. The model shows that citizens do not always punish their leader for backing down and that the leader sometimes does choose to back down. Moreover, citizens give more support to their leader's decisions if the issue at hand becomes more complex or salient to them. In sum, the model's results suggest that the leader's commitments do not always effectively tie hands, especially in complex and high-stake bargaining situations---the very settings in which such commitments have been expected to be highly binding. The non-parametric combination analysis of a crossover survey experiment confirms the hypotheses derived from the main model and the overall theory. I then extend the model to the international level to examine under which condition a leader commits, and when such commitments successfully deter a foreign counterpart from continuing a crisis. The extension shows that the leader faces greater odds of punishment when (s)he commits than when not, and Foreign therefore is more likely to stop given the commitment than given non-commitment. However, when Foreign anticipates that the leader is likely to concede in case of a continued crisis, the commitment is less likely to credibly convince Foreign that the leader is willing to fight. If so, the leader faces less incentive to commit, or trade off greater odds of punishment for a small chance of deterring Foreign.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Domestic Constituents and International Bargaining Outcome . . . . 3
1.3 Overview of Extant Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.3.1 The Assumption of Domestic Repercussions for Backing Down in the International Bargaining Literature 4
1.3.2 Formal Models on Leader’s Bargaining Commitment . . . . . 7
1.3.3 Survey Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.4 The Main Model - Domestic Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.5 Empirical Analysis of the Main Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.6 The Extended Model - International Decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.7 Novel Features of the Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2 Main Model: When Can a Leader’s Commitment Tie Hands? 24
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.2 The Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.3 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.3.1 Baseline Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.3.2 The Full Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.4 Complex and Salient International Bargaining Settings . . . . . . . . 38
2.4.1 Issue Complexity (¯
2.4.2 Issue Salience (s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.4.3 Revisiting Key Assumptions in the Literature . . . . . . . . . 42
2.4.4 The Generation and Impacts of Audience Costs . . . . . . . . 46
2.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3 Empirical Analysis of the Domestic Model 52
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3.2 Hypotheses and Experimental Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
3.2.1 Hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.2.2 Vignette Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.2.3 Crossover Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.3 Non-parametric Combination (NPC) Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.4 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.4.1 Crossover Experiment Analysis with NPC . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.4.2 Robustness Check . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3.5 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
4 Model Extension - International Level 77
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.2 The Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
4.2.1 Novel Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
4.2.2 Order and Payoffs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
4.3 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
4.3.1 Domestic Subgame without a Commitment . . . . . . . . . . . 86
4.3.2 Domestic Subgame after a Commitment . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
4.3.3 International Level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
4.4 Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
4.4.1 Potential Gains of Fighting (pa) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
4.4.2 Commitments in a High-Stake Bargaining Crisis . . . . . . . . 102
4.5 Illustrative Example - Revisiting Red Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
4.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
5 Conclusion 110
A Chapter 2 113
A.1 Proposition 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
A.2 Definition 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
A.3 Boundary Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
A.4 Comparative statics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
B Chapter 3 129
C Chapter 4 131
C.1 Propositions 6 and 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
C.2 Foreign’s strategies (F) - Proposition 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
C.3 Leader’s strategies (LI) - Proposition 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
C.4 Corollary 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
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