The Domestic Politics of International Cooperation.
Christina J. Schneider
April, 2017
Abstract
How does domestic politics affect international cooperation? Even though classic work on international relations already acknowledges the central role of domestic politics in international relations, the first generation of scholarly work on international cooperation focused almost exclusively on the international sources of cooperation and theories that explicitly link domestic politics and international cooperation did not take a more prominent place in the scholarly work on international cooperation until the late 1980s.This paper reviews and analyzes recent research on how interests and institutions at the domestic level affect the cooperation of governments at the international level. My analysis is structured along a political economy model, which emphasizes the decision-making calculus of office-motivated political leaders who find themselves under pressure by different societal groups interested in promoting or hindering international cooperation. These pressures are conveyed, constrained, and calibrated by domestic institutions, which provide an important context for policy-making, and in particular for the choice to cooperate at the international level. I embed this standard political economy model of domestic politics within models of international cooperation, which entail decisions by governments about (a) whether to cooperate (and to comply with international agreements), (b) how to distribute the gains and costs from cooperation, (c) and how to design cooperation as to maximize the likelihood that the public good will be provided.
The review highlights the significance of domestic politics to explain all aspects of international cooperation. The likelihood that governments engage in international cooperation does not only depend on international factors, but is also and sometimes predominantly driven by the demands of societal groups and variations in institutional structures across countries. Domestic factors can explain how governments behave in distributive negotiations, whether they can achieve advantageous deals, and if negotiations succeed to produce an international collective action. They also contribute to our understanding about whether and how governments comply with international agreements, and consequently, with the design of international institutions to maximize compliance. More recently, scholars have become more interested in the democratic responsiveness of governments when they cooperate at the international level, and whereas research is still sparse, emerging evidence points to responsive conduct of governments particularly when international cooperation is politicized at the national level.
Keywords:
domestic politics, international cooperation, international organizations, enforcement, compliance, democratic responsiveness