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

Abstract

How does domestic regime type affect bilateral cooperation, and one of its most visible manifestations, bilateral treaties? This paper explains how domestic political 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. Because additional 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 agreements formalizing bilateral cooperation.

Keywords: regime type, domestic constraints, bilateral bargaining, treaties, two-level games