POL-UA 700 International Politics

 

Power

Definition of power

Methods of exercising power

Cheap talk vs. costly signals

Anticipatory punishment

Measuring Power

Limitations to power

Fungibility of Power

Projecting power over distances

Interactive effect between power and motivation

 

Bargaining and War (Fearon (1995) Rationalist Explanations of War)

Central puzzle of war/ War as ex-post inefficient

5 “Rationalist” explanations for war

Fearon’s bargaining model

Issue indivisibility

Private information and incentives to misrepresent

Commitment problems

 

 

Domestic Politics & International Relations (from Chapters 2 and 6)

Levels of analysis

The “State” (the modern sovereign state)

Strategic perspective: the role of domestic politics in the strategic perspective

Mechanisms by which government rules/institutions can influence/constrain foreign policies

Bureaucratic-Interest Group Perspective

• Governmental organizations/agencies/ Organizational roles
• Principal Agent problems (principal, agent, agency slack)
• Interest groups

Domestic politics and international

• Domestic audience costs (understand what they are; how regime type matters; the effects audience costs can have in an international crisis, but you do not need to know the model)
• Diversionary war
• Gambling for resurrection hypothesis

 

 

Democratic Peace (from Chapter 14)

What the democratic peace is

Immanuel Kant & Perpetual Peace

Empirical support for the democratic peace

Normative argument

Institutional constraints argument

Additional empirical findings of the democratic peace literature

 

 

Selectorate Theory (Chapter 2)

Selectorate

Winning coalition

Disenfranchised

Different types of regimes (monarchies, military juntas, authoritarian states, rigged autocracies, modern democracies) and how they can be differentiated according to the sizes of the winning coalition and the selectorate

Leader vs. challenger

Private goods/Public goods

Allocation of resources and leader incentives for allocation based on the sizes of the winning coalition and the selectorate

Loyalty norm

Selectorate theory implications for different outcomes: public goods economic policy, trade policy, effectiveness of sanctions, kleptocracy and corruption

Selectorate Theory & War (from Chapters 6 and 14)

• Explanation for the democratic peace and other empirical regularities
• Novel hypotheses related to war
• International interventions & War aims (and relationship to size of the winning coalition)
• Active vs. passive compliance
  • Nation-building: Incentives for democratic nation-building

Foreign Aid (Chapter 12)

• The foreign aid debate
• The strategic use of aid: Aid for policy concessions
• Who gives and who gets aid

 

 

International cooperation (Chapter 7)

Cooperation

Interdependence

Collective action/ Collective action problems

Public goods

Freeriding

Common pool resources and the tragedy of the commons

Overcoming collective action problems

Enforcement

• Repeated interactions/ repeated prisoner’s dilemma
• Punishment
• Discount rate
• Shadow of the future

Compliance

Downs, Rocke, and Barsooom (1996)

• Selection bias
• Depth of cooperation
• Relationship between depth and the need for enforcement

The “Broader-Deeper Tradeoff”

 

Alliances

Mutual defense agreements

Neutrality/non-aggression agreements

Consultation agreements

Collective security arrangements

Purposes of alliances

Security-autonomy tradeoff theory

Alliance reliability

 

 

Extra problems for practice

 

1. Two countries, A and B, have a conflict over a common b . The b can take values from zero to one, inclusive, where x is the percentage of the disputed territory under Country A’s control. Country B’s ideal point for the b is 0.  Country A’s ideal point for the b is 1.  Country A’s utility function is x and Country B’s utility function is 1-x and, where x is the point at which the b is actually set.  If the two countries go to war over the b dispute, the winner will set the b at its ideal point.

 

1. a) Assume that the probability of A winning the war is 0.65. Assume that A’s costs of war are 0.10 and B’s costs of war are 0.15. What is A’s expected utility of war?  What is B’s expected utility of war?  What is the range of bargains that A would accept to avoid war?  What is the range of bargains that B would accept in to avoid war?  What is the bargaining range?

 

 

1. b) Assume that the probability of A winning the war is 0.45. What is A’s expected utility of war? What is B’s expected utility of war?  What is the range of bargains that A would accept to avoid war?  What is the range of bargains that B would accept in to avoid war?  What is the bargaining range?

 

 

		State B
		C	D
State A	C	(10,10)	(0,20)
	D	(20,0)	(5,5)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. a) Based on the above game, what is the Nash equilibrium?

 

 

1. b) If the game is repeated indefinitely, and State A’s discount rate of 0.9 and State B’s discount rate is 0.75:

 

1. how many periods of punishment would State A have to threaten State B with to get State B to cooperate?

 

 

1. how many periods of punishment would State B have to threaten State A with to get State A to cooperate?

 

 

1. c) Are your answers for bi and bii the same or different? Explain why