Why do international institutions vary so widely in terms of such key institutional features as membership, scope, and flexibility? We argue that international actors are goal-seeking agents who make specific institutional design choices to solve the particular cooperation problems they face in different issue-areas. In this article we introduce the theoretical framework of the Rational Design project. We identify five important features of institutions—membership, scope, centralization, control, and flexibility—and explain their variation in terms of four independent variables that characterize different cooperation problems: distribution, number of actors, enforcement, and uncertainty. We draw on rational choice theory to develop a series of empirically falsifiable conjectures that explain this institutional variation. The authors of the articles in this special issue of International Organization evaluate the conjectures in specific issue-areas and the overall Rational Design approach.
I nternational cooperation is plagued by uncertainty. Although states negotiate the best agreements possible using available information, unpredictable things happen after agreements are signed that are beyond states' control. States may not even commit themselves to an agreement if they anticipate that circumstances will alter their expected benefits. Duration provisions can insure states in this context. Specifically, the use of finite duration depends positively on the degree of uncertainty and states' relative risk aversion and negatively on the cost. These formally derived hypotheses strongly survive a test with data on a random sample of agreements across all four of the major issue areas in international relations. Not only do the results, highlighting evidence on multiple kinds of flexibility provisions, strongly suggest that the design of international agreements is systematic and sophisticated; but also they call attention to common ground among various subfields of political science and law.
The tyranny of an unamendable constitution might lead to revolution; the forced continuance of the legal status quo as between states might make it more difficult to preserve peace. ' We all know that future generations will have to live, even on a strictly technological level, in a setting very different from the present one. To imprison them in an iron corset, which could not be adjusted to the changing conditions of history, would in our opinion expose that corset to the danger of bursting. We therefore prefer a steel corset which, being more flexible, could more effectively assure the continuation of the treaty.-Statement issued by Italian representative Roberto Caracciolo regarding the proposed Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. 2How can the corsets of international agreements be made more flexible and therefore more robust? Or, in the words of Jon Elster, how can Ulysses be loosely bound to the mast? 3 This is an important question for the simple reason that international cooperation is important, and international cooperation is often institutionalized in the form of international agreements. Existing international agreements are testament to states' willingness and ability to cooperate despite the international anarchy in which they find themselves. Given the difficulties of cooperation under anarchy documented in the recent international relations literature, understanding how states manage to bring about the formal cooperation embodied in international agreements is of both theoretical and practical interest.
An examination of a random sample of international agreements that are conditional on four issue areas shows that only about one out of every two agreements has any dispute resolution provision. This observation begs for an explanation, and which half needs explaining depends on where one is sitting. Do power politics dominate international law, or does the law provide a fundamental order? Employing a rational choice framework, I focus on a set of independent variables that capture the cooperation problem being addressed by members to an agreement and put forth conjectures explaining the inclusion of dispute resolution provisions. Using newly collected data, I find that agreements that address complex cooperation problems, that is, problems characterized by uncertainty, prisoner's dilemma–like incentives to defect, and/or time inconsistency, are more likely to include such provisions. I therefore suggest that international law is quite efficient, with states not creating and/or delegating dispute resolution authority when it is unlikely to be needed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.