Design in Context: Existing International Agreements and New Cooperation

Abstract

This research note highlights an important element missing from rational design theories of international agreements: "institutional context"-the presence or absence of existing and prior agreements between prospective partners in "new" cooperation. If, as rational design theorists argue, agreement design is deliberate, strategic, and directed toward enhancing contracting parties' ability to credibly commit to future cooperation, then prior design "successes" should influence the terms of additional cooperation. We test for this omitted variable problem in three agreement design outcomes: ex ante limitations on agreement duration, exit clauses, and disputesettlement provisions. Through an augmentation and reanalysis of data from a key study in the rational design literature-Barbara Koremenos's "Contracting Around International Uncertainty"-we show institutional context is positively correlated with inclusion of ex ante time limitations in negotiated agreements and negatively correlated with the inclusion of exit clauses and third-party dispute-settlement provisions. Institutional context also mediates and conditions the effects of the explanatory variable at the heart of existing rational design theories-uncertainty about the future distribution of gains from cooperation. Our findings show that the collective appeal of particular design features varies not only with the nature of underlying strategic problems, but also with degrees of shared institutional context. Rationalist explanations of international cooperation have long treated institutions as efforts to resolve collective action problems and achieve mutual gains. Early studies described the underlying challenges using basic game-theoretic structures such as the Prisoners' Dilemma. 1 More recent work further distills these structures into problems of credibility, distributional conflict, monitoring, and enforcement. 2 This convention has carried over to work on the "rational design" of international institutions, which is grounded in the intuitively appealing idea that states craft agreements to tackle

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“…Moreover, a focus on power resources alone ignores the international political context through which such resources get filtered as polities engage with one another and attempt to achieve their policy goals. Finally, the contribution contributes to a growing literature in international relations (IR), comparative politics and European studies highlighting the role of context for conditioning causal relationships (Copelovitch and Putnam 2014;Falleti and Lynch 2009;Müller et al 2014). Ultimately, our analytic approach focusing on the role that context plays in shaping EU policy strategies offers a more nuanced and tractable set of expectations regarding the debate on the EU as a global actor.…”

“…This contribution's answer turns on the broader global regulatory context (Copelovitch and Putnam 2014;Falleti and Lynch 2009;Weber 1994), variance within which conditions EU foreign regulatory strategies and behavior. Thus, while not making predictions about EU influence over specific outcomes per se (that is, when it will be able to achieve its goal of being a rule-maker, a rule-blocker, or a rule-taker [Young 2015a]), the contribution looks to the global regulatory context to deduce scope conditions under which the EU can (or cannot) be expected to adopt different policy strategies.…”

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“…Building on some of the insights from the RD literature, and the aforementioned observations by Copelovitch and Putnam (2014), we develop an argument as to how context affected the design outcomes of the WTO DSS. Our first step is to define what the context is in our case.…”