Democratic Backsliding and International Cooperation

• In Event: Regime Type and International Cooperation

Abstract

Much attention has been given to the breach of democratic norms and processes that have become common in democratic states over the past two decades. While there have been numerous analyses of why this backsliding has occurred, yet fewer studies have analyzed the implications of this backsliding for international cooperation. This is an important question given that the foundations of the literature on the “democratic advantage” in international cooperation is founded on the normative and institutional constraints thought to be part and parcel to internal democratic governance. Presumably if the internal constraints of democracy are relaxed, democratic states become less likely to cooperate and less reliable cooperation partners. This paper investigates this hypothesis using a large-N cross-country time-series analysis of international cooperation and regime type. Using events data to measure foreign policy behavior, we find that states which experience democratic backsliding are indeed less cooperative with other states. Yet, tracing the mechanism leading to less cooperative behavior is difficult: often some of the same factors giving rise to democratic backsliding domestically are simultaneously undermining international cooperation. We explore whether the timing of declines in cooperative behavior can be used to explore the causal ordering of the underlying process. This further analysis shows that much of the decline in cooperation is due to increasingly hostile rhetoric between democracies, rather than a decline in cooperative policy behavior.

Author

• Jon C. W. Pevehouse, University of Wisconsin, Madison