When Do Leaders Free-Ride? Business Experience and Contributions to Collective Defense

Fuhrmann, Matthew

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2960891

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…If alliances do provide public goods, they may only do so in particular circumstances. Small states may only reduce military spending if they believe allied commitments are credible (Goldstein, 1995; DiGiuseppe and Poast, 2018), or leaders are inclined to lower spending (Fuhrmann, 2020). If that is the case, inquiry should emphasize sources of leverage in bargaining between alliance members (Morrow, 1991; Norrlof, 2010; Brooks et al, 2013; Johnson, 2015; Kim, 2016).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reassessing the public goods theory of alliances

Alley

2021

Research & Politics

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The public goods theory of alliances exerts substantial influence on scholarship and policy, especially through its claim that small alliance participants free-ride on larger partners. Prior statistical tests of free-riding suffer from model specification and generalizability problems, however, so there is little reliable and general evidence about this prediction. In this study, I address those limitations with a new test of the free-riding hypothesis. Using data on 204 alliances from 1919 to 2007, I examine how often states with a small share of total GDP in an alliance decrease military spending while states with a large share of allied GDP increase military spending. I find little evidence to support this expression of the free-riding hypothesis. This implies that free-riding based on economic weight is unusual in alliance politics, which may be due to limits on alliance security as a public good or bargaining between alliance members.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reassessing the public goods theory of alliances

Alley

2021

Research & Politics

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“…Demands that welfare recipients work to receive benefits often invoke equity principles, for example, and research on free-riding demonstrates that equity violations plague social dilemmas (Ostrom 1998). Fuhrmann (2020) describes how weaker states in an alliance have incentives to free-ride because they can benefit from collective deterrence while powerful allies like the U.S. pay the costs. When policymakers protest that it is unfair for some NATO members to dedicate the requisite 2 percent of their GDP to defense while others spend less but receive the same security benefits from the alliance, they call attention to inequity.…”

Section: What's Fair In Foreign Policy?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consistent with research on the role of equality in foreign policy public opinion (Kertzer et al 2014), we can treat equity concerns as an individual difference, asking not just whether equity matters, but for whom. Like the business-minded leaders in Fuhrmann's (2020) research on free-riding, some members of the public might be especially sensitive to imbalances between inputs and outcomes.…”

Section: What's Fair In Foreign Policy?mentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s Fair in International Politics? Equity, Equality, and Foreign Policy Attitudes

Powers

Kertzer

Brooks

et al. 2021

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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How do concerns about fairness shape foreign policy preferences? In this article, we show that fairness has two faces—one concerning equity, the other concerning equality—and that taking both into account can shed light on the structure of important foreign policy debates. Fielding an original survey on a national sample of Americans, we show that different types of Americans think about fairness in different ways, and that these fairness concerns shape foreign policy preferences: individuals who emphasize equity are far more sensitive to concerns about burden sharing, are far less likely to support US involvement abroad when other countries aren’t paying their fair share, and often support systematically different foreign policies than individuals who emphasize equality. As long as IR scholars focus only on the equality dimension of fairness, we miss much about how fairness concerns matter in world politics.

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“…In contrast to the structural approach-which subordinates the role of agency and domestic factors as determinants of international diplomacy-researchers rooted in agent-based and sociological theories emphasize the role of individual diplomats, foreign leaders and their experience, and domestic-level dynamics such as the role of diasporas and political preferences in Congress (Fuhrmann, 2020;Saunders, 2011;Wong, 2015). These scholars do not entirely reject the strategic interests emphasized by structural theorists, but focus more on the characteristics and preferences of individuals and groups in explaining various diplomatic processes and outcomes.…”

Section: Explaining Diplomatic Visitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visiting the hegemon: Explaining diplomatic visits to the United States

Koliev

Lundgren

2021

Research & Politics

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Diplomacy is a chief instrument of foreign policy. Through high-level diplomatic visits, governments can facilitate cooperation and signal the quality of their relations with other states. Because host countries cannot receive an indefinite number of visits, they must make strategic decisions, prioritizing some countries over others. This reveals information about their foreign policy priorities as well as diplomatic hierarchies and practices in the system as a whole. But what determines high-level diplomatic visits? Existing scholarship disagrees. In this research note, we assess the determinants of high-level diplomatic visits to the U.S. Theoretically, we draw on previous studies and formulate structural, domestic, and practice-oriented accounts of high-level visits as tools of foreign policy. Empirically, we gather original data on diplomatic visits to the U.S. by foreign leaders from 1946 to 2012. Our main results are two-fold. First, high-level diplomatic visits to the U.S. are primarily determined by structural factors such as economic relations. Second, we find clear differences in invited country profiles during and after the Cold War, demonstrating that high-level visits are used strategically to promote shifting foreign policy priorities.

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When Do Leaders Free-Ride? Business Experience and Contributions to Collective Defense

Cited by 6 publications

References 68 publications

Reassessing the public goods theory of alliances

Reassessing the public goods theory of alliances

What’s Fair in International Politics? Equity, Equality, and Foreign Policy Attitudes

Visiting the hegemon: Explaining diplomatic visits to the United States

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