Negotiation in the Street: Domestic Protests and International Bargaining

• In Event: How Contentious Domestic Politics Shape Foreign Policy

Abstract

Stronger executive constraints may enhance a government’s leverage in international bargaining by justifying its firm stance. Yet, much work only considers the formal political institutions such as legislative checks on executive power or regime type while neglecting population-based constraints. Also, the audience costs literature does not provide significant analysis of how a government’s foreign counterpart will assess the credibility of the government’s attempts to signal its domestic audience costs. In this study, I confront these gaps focusing on popular protests as a non-institutional source of executive constraints and examining the foreign counterpart’s evaluation process. I ask: How do domestic protests influence the government’s bargaining position in international conflicts? I argue that domestic protests can indeed enhance a government’s bargaining leverage, but only when the foreign counterpart finds the protests credible. The credibility of protests varies depending on the three factors: protest intensity, the domestic government’s regime traits, and whether the domestic government represses protests. I test my theory using data on protests involving claims about international crises, collated with natural language processing (NLP) of Historical Phoenix Event Data. I analyze the effect of such protests on the outcomes of crises bargaining identified in the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) datasets.

Author

• Sangmi Jeong, University of Arizona