Summary of Cowhey: Domestic institutions and the credibility of international commitments -- Adam Brown, BYU Political Science

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Cowhey: Domestic institutions and the credibility of international commitments

Disclaimer. Don't rely on these old notes in lieu of reading the literature, but they can jog your memory. As a grad student long ago, my peers and I collaborated to write and exchange summaries of political science research. I posted them to a wiki-style website. "Wikisum" is now dead but archived here. I cannot vouch for these notes' accuracy, nor can I say who wrote them.

Cowhey. 1993. Domestic institutions and the credibility of international commitments: Japan and the United States. International Organization 47 (spring): 299-326.

VARIABLES AND HYPOTHESES

Like medieval monarchs, modern great powers face credibility problems. Even though they may find it advantageous to use multilateral institutions, they always have the power to renege on commitments to other countries.

A state's domestic institutions (X) affect its international credibility (Y) (more specifically, Y is the credibility of a commitment made by a great power to a multilateral regime). Three variables matter:

X1: "Collective goods": Whether politicians have incentives to produce public or private goods. Cowhey doesn't say it, but this sounds like Bueno de Mesquita et al's selectorate theory. US leaders have incentives to produce public goods; cronyism in Japan creates incentives to produce private goods.
X2: "Division of power": If Cowhey had written a few years earlier, he would have called this "the number of veto points." Power should be divided enough that decisions are hard to come to and hard to change once made. (MacIntyre argues that states should have an intermediate number of veto points to avoid rigidity on the one hand and volatility on the other. Cowhey seems to favor something closer to rigidity, but obviously there must be enough flexibility that treaties can be ratified in the first place). The divided majoritarianism in the US meets this standard; Japan's parliamentarism does not.
X3: "Transparency": A game theorist would call this informational symmetry. If the great power wants to renege, can other states find out soon enough to cut their losses? The high transparency in American debate makes this possible; Japan's closed system does not.

CRITICISM

These institutions only apply to democracies. How, then, could the USSR or China ever make a credible commitment? They make commitments, and other states accept these commitments, so there must be some mechanism by which non-democratic great powers can make credible commitments. Wouldn't these same mechanisms also enable the US to make credible commitments?

Research on similar subjects

Milner: Interests, institutions, and information (4 shared tags)
Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith: An institutional explanation of the democratic peace (3 shared tags)
Fearon: Rationalist explanations for war (3 shared tags)
Lake and Rothchild: Containing fear (3 shared tags)
Martin: Democratic commitments (3 shared tags)
Morrow: The strategic setting of choices (3 shared tags)
Schultz: Do democratic institutions constrain or inform (3 shared tags)
Gartzke: War is in the error term (2 shared tags)

Tags

Cowhey, Peter (author) • International Relations • Domestic Politics and International Relations • Credible Commitment • Veto Players • Selectorate Theory • Information • Public Goods

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