Bargaining within Crises

Abstract

Do certain patterns of actors’ behavior reinforce or undermine democracy? Are different patterns of bargaining associated with different regime types? Earlier work (Casper and Taylor 1996) showed that countries where actors bargained intensely to install democracy after a period of authoritarianism were more likely to have negotiated a wide range of details concerning the new rules of the game. To the extent that this pattern of bargaining and cooperation continued, the new democracies were more likely to consolidate. In this paper, we consider the effect of actors’ behavior in a broader set of circumstances – national crises – to see whether different patterns of cooperation or conflict are associated with different regime types. We used both qualitative and quantitative analysis to answer our research questions. Qualitative analysis entailed capturing actors’ behavior across forty-two crises in twelve countries from 1950-1999. We used three crises that occurred in Italy as the basis on which to derive hypotheses for the crises in our remaining eleven countries. For the quantitative analysis, we coded actors’ behavior across the crises using the Intranational Political Interactions (IPI) codes. We then applied sequence analysis to cluster the crises based on the actors’ levels of cooperation and conflict. Over two-thirds of our sample cluster into two distinct groups that differ in the level and duration of conflict as well as regime type. Furthermore, three factors are associated with these patterns of clustering: need, group support, and type of crisis. In future work we plan to extend our investigation of the actors’ behavior to explain regime stability.