Political Groups, Coordination Costs, and Credible Communication in the Shadow of Power

Yoder, Brandon K.; Gaubatz, Kurt Taylor; Schutte, Rachel A.

doi:10.1002/polq.12961

Cited by 1 publication

(3 citation statements)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…23 The costliness of maintaining a consistently cooperative veneer is a function of transparency-the degree to which outside parties observe a state's internal policy 16. Carson 2018;Carson and Yarhi-Milo 2017;Joseph and Poznansky 2018;Kurizaki 2007;O'Rourke 2018;Otto and Spaniel 2021;Poznansky 2020;Yarhi-Milo 2013;Yoder, Gaubatz, and Schutte 2019. Consistent with this literature, "covert activities" here refers not only to active covert operations but also to the process of secretly formulating and preparing to implement policies in the future. Our model is fungible across both of these contexts.…”

Section: Credible Reassurance: Costly Signals and Cheap Talkmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…16.Carson 2018; Carson and Yarhi-Milo 2017; Joseph and Poznansky 2018; Kurizaki 2007; O'Rourke 2018; Otto and Spaniel 2021; Poznansky 2020; Yarhi-Milo 2013; Yoder, Gaubatz, and Schutte 2019. Consistent with this literature, “covert activities” here refers not only to active covert operations but also to the process of secretly formulating and preparing to implement policies in the future.…”

mentioning

confidence: 87%

“…30.Many factors affect states’ transparency aside from regime type (see, for example, Bell 2013; Finel and Lord 1999; Florini 1998; Joseph and Poznansky 2018; Yoder, Gaubatz, and Schutte 2019). Most obvious is the necessity of communication for policy coordination.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Costly Concealment: Secret Foreign Policymaking, Transparency, and Credible Reassurance

Yoder

Spaniel

2022

Int Org

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article presents a formal model that shows how states can credibly reassure each other simply by maintaining a cooperative outward narrative. The reassurance literature to date has focused largely on costly signaling, whereby benign states must distinguish themselves by taking specific actions that hostile types would not. The mere lack of overtly expressed hostility without costly signals has been considered “cheap talk,” on the assumption that this behavior is costless for hostile states and thus uninformative. In contrast, this paper argues that maintaining a cooperative façade while secretly formulating and executing exploitative policies carries inherent trade-offs, and thus constitutes a credible reassurance signal. Foreign policy planning and implementation requires communication among various individuals, groups, and organizations, which has some probability of being observed and punished by outside actors. Yet efforts to conceal the policymaking process and reduce this probability are costly—they require investments in internal monitoring and restrictions on internal communication that can substantially degrade policy outcomes. Thus, to the extent that a state's foreign policymaking process is transparent—that is, that concealing internal communications is difficult—the absence of positive signals of hostility is a credible signal of its benign intentions. The argument is illustrated with a case study of German reassurance signals during the July Crisis preceding World War I.

show abstract