Information Provision and Domestic Sources of International Cooperation

• In Event: Experimental Approaches to Understanding International Cooperation

Abstract

How can international institutions effect positive change among self-interested states? Previous research suggests international institutions provide valuable information to domestic actors that helps them gauge the extent to which their government is fulfilling its obligations and facilitates mobilization when government policies are inadequate. Hence, international institutions can indirectly improve outcomes by motivating and enabling domestic actors to hold their governments accountable to international commitments. This paper focuses on how information generated by international institutions influences environmental politics, specifically the issue of climate change, which exhibits the basic characteristics of a threshold public good. I use a laboratory experiment to examine how information affects the willingness of domestic actors to exert costly pressure on a leader to change its behavior. I show that when the institution provides domestic actors with information about their leaders’ contributions, leaders contribute greater amounts to the public good, and domestic actors condition their decisions to try and remove a leader on the quality of leaders’ contributions. This study has important implications for understanding when and how international institutions affect state behavior and contributes policy-relevant insight about how to design effective international institutions.

Author

• Jessica Edry, Rice University