Bureaucratic Reputations: Explaining Interstate Cooperation on Border Security

• In Event: Bureaucracies and Foreign Policy

Abstract

Despite tensions between the United States and Mexico concerning migration and a border wall, a set of unprecedented efforts have taken place to increase U.S.-Mexico cooperation on border security and migration control. To explain patterns of cooperation, I put forward an explanatory theory of interstate cooperation on border security. I argue that the expanding nature and institutionalization of U.S.-Mexico cooperation on border security can be explained by entrepreneurial mid-level bureaucrats, and their strategic leveraging of bureaucratic international reputations and security shocks. My theory privileges mid-level bureaucrats as key actors capable of acting internationally on their separable preferences. I argue that entrepreneurial bureaucrats can strategically create and leverage bureaucratic international reputations to enable interstate bureaucratic cooperation. I point to migration shocks as key moments during which entrepreneurial bureaucrats can significantly expand cooperation. My work on United States and Mexico relations shows that mid-level bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security strategically leverage an organizational reputation among international audiences to facilitate interagency cooperation, and that entrepreneurial bureaucrats within the migration enforcement agencies in both the United States and Mexico leverage migration shocks as windows of opportunities to initiate, intensify, and expand the nature of cooperative agendas on matters of border security.

Author

• Angie Maritza Bautista-Chavez, Harvard University