Socialization, Reassurance, and Cheap Talk Diplomacy

• In Event: Bargaining and Disputes

Abstract

Recent scholarship has combined rationalist and constructivist insights to examine how the prospect of socialization affects the credibility of foreign policy signals and the feasibility of cooperation under anarchy. The basic premise is that cooperative behavior can engender convergent preferences, and non-cooperative behavior does the opposite. However, these models have assumed that a state’s current decision makers pay no cost when national preferences change. This is often unrealistic, as one of the main mechanisms underlying such preference shifts is a change in leadership. Building on past work, this paper presents a model of interstate reassurance with endogenous preferences in which actors a) incur a cost for being socialized and b) have the opportunity to send a cheap-talk signal of their type at the outset of the game. The model shows that under some conditions, hostile senders honestly reveal their type on the first move. This makes even costless cooperative signals highly credible, and thus makes reassurance trivially easy. The intuition behind this powerful result is straightforward: because hostile types incur a cost for being positively socialized, they have an incentive to deter the other state from acting cooperatively. The key condition is that the likelihood of socialization must fall in an intermediate range, high enough that the receiver’s cooperation threatens the hostile sender’s leaders but not so high that a benign receiver would cooperate unconditionally. When this condition is satisfied, simple cheap-talk reassurances of benign intentions become fully credible. We illustrate the argument with case studies of the breakdown in US-PRC relations in 1949 and their rapprochement in the 1970s.

Authors

• Kyle Haynes, Purdue University

• Brandon Yoder, Australian National University