Brad L. LeVeck

The Role of Self-Interest in Elite Bargaining

Significance Humans frequently act contrary to their self-interest and reject low offers in bargaining games. Some evidence suggests that elites, however, are much more rational and self-interested, but this hypothesis has never been directly tested in bargaining games. Using a unique sample of US policy and business elites, we find the opposite. Compared with typical convenience samples, elites are even more prone to act contrary to self-interest by rejecting low offers when bargaining. Appearing to anticipate this fact, elites also make higher offers. This may help to explain why policy elites, such as the diplomats who negotiate treaties on topics like global warming, pay close attention to distributional concerns even though such concerns have been a perennial source of policy gridlock. One of the best-known and most replicated laboratory results in behavioral economics is that bargainers frequently reject low offers, even when it harms their material self-interest. This finding could have important implications for international negotiations on many problems facing humanity today, because models of international bargaining assume exactly the opposite: that policy makers are rational and self-interested. However, it is unknown whether elites who engage in diplomatic bargaining will similarly reject low offers because past research has been based almost exclusively on convenience samples of undergraduates, members of the general public, or small-scale societies rather than highly experienced elites who design and bargain over policy. Using a unique sample of 102 policy and business elites who have an average of 21 y of practical experience conducting international diplomacy or policy strategy, we show that, compared with undergraduates and the general public, elites are actually more likely to reject low offers when playing a standard “ultimatum game” that assesses how players bargain over a fixed resource. Elites with more experience tend to make even higher demands, suggesting that this tendency only increases as policy makers advance to leadership positions. This result contradicts assumptions of rational self-interested behavior that are standard in models of international bargaining, and it suggests that the adoption of global agreements on international trade, climate change, and other important problems will not depend solely on the interests of individual countries, but also on whether these accords are seen as equitable to all member states.

How Activists Perceive the Utility of International Law

Scholars agree that international law works in part by empowering activists and have elaborated activist-focused theories particularly in the domains of environment and human rights. Some theories emphasize accountability—that law helps activists coerce, punish, and deter offenders. Others emphasize that law helps to foster dialogue that leads to the acceptance of norms, trust, and capacity to foster compliance. Possibly, law does both. We assess these views with a pair of survey experiments applied to 243 highly experienced NGO professionals who have firsthand experience in either environment or human rights. Activists believe that NGOs would be less effective at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases or violations of core human rights in the absence of international law. They see the chief value of law arising through accountability politics rather than by fostering dialogue or capacity. However, the two communities have different views about whether binding or nonbinding agreements work best in their domain.

Corruption drives the emergence of civil society.

Centralized sanctioning institutions have been shown to emerge naturally through social learning, displace all other forms of punishment and lead to stable cooperation. However, this result provokes a number of questions. If centralized sanctioning is so successful, then why do many highly authoritarian states suffer from low levels of cooperation? Why do states with high levels of public good provision tend to rely more on citizen-driven peer punishment? Here, we consider how corruption influences the evolution of cooperation and punishment. Our model shows that the effectiveness of centralized punishment in promoting cooperation breaks down when some actors in the model are allowed to bribe centralized authorities. Counterintuitively, a weaker centralized authority is actually more effective because it allows peer punishment to restore cooperation in the presence of corruption. Our results provide an evolutionary rationale for why public goods provision rarely flourishes in polities that rely only on strong centralized institutions. Instead, cooperation requires both decentralized and centralized enforcement. These results help to explain why citizen participation is a fundamental necessity for policing the commons.

How International Reputation Matters: Revisiting Alliance Violations in Context

ABSTRACT We investigate the role of international reputation in alliance politics by developing a signaling theory linking past alliance violations with the formation of future alliance commitments. In our theory, past violations Are useful signals of future alliance reliability conditional on whether they effectively separate reliable from unreliable alliance partners. It follows that states evaluating potential alliance partners will interpret past violations in their context when deciding to enter a new alliance, attaching less weight to violations in “harder times,” when many states are defaulting on their alliance commitments together, and more weight to violations in “easier times,” when fewer states are defaulting on their alliances. We test our theory and find that states are empirically more likely to form new alliances with states that violated in harder times compared to states that violated in easier times. The results have important implications for how scholars understand and estimate the impact of international reputation.

Money, Reputation, and Incumbency in U.S. House Elections, or Why Marginals Have Become More Expensive

Since 1972, campaign spending by House incumbents has skyrocketed, particularly in those districts with marginal support for the incumbents party. At the same time, parties in the House have become much more cohesive in the way they vote, producing more precise and informative party brands. We argue that these two phenomena are fundamentally linked. As parties have developed more precise reputations, incumbents in these districts must spend much more to attract voters in “marginal” districts, who would be willing to vote for a candidate with the particular incumbents legislative record, but not the average member of his party. Increasingly precise party reputations provide voters with stronger priors that incumbents are just like the rest of their party, and incumbents in marginal districts must spend more to overcome these beliefs. We demonstrate this using a simple formal model and test it empirically using campaign-spending data from 1972 to 2008.

Detecting reciprocity at a global scale

Reciprocity is a widespread mechanism for cooperation in international relations. Reciprocity stabilizes cooperation from the level of microbes all the way up to humans interacting in small groups, but does reciprocity also underlie stable cooperation between larger human agglomerations, such as nation states? Famously, evolutionary models show that reciprocity could emerge as a widespread strategy for achieving international cooperation. However, existing studies have only detected reciprocity-driven cooperation in a small number of country pairs. We apply a new method for detecting mutual influence in dynamical systems to a new large-scale data set that records state interactions with high temporal resolution. Doing so, we detect reciprocity between many country pairs in the international system and find that these reciprocating country pairs exhibit qualitatively different cooperative dynamics when compared to nonreciprocating pairs. Consistent with evolutionary theories of cooperation, reciprocating country pairs exhibit higher levels of stable cooperation and are more likely to punish instances of noncooperation. However, countries in reciprocity-based relationships are also quicker to forgive single acts of noncooperation by eventually returning to previous levels of mutual cooperation. By contrast, nonreciprocating pairs are more likely to exploit each other’s cooperation via higher rates of defection. Together, these findings provide the strongest evidence to date that reciprocity is a widespread mechanism for achieving international cooperation.

Inferring mechanisms for global constitutional progress

Constitutions help define domestic political orders, but are known to be influenced by international mechanisms that are normative, temporal and network based. Here we introduce the concept of the ‘provision space’—the set of all legal provisions existing across the world’s constitutions, which grows over time. We make use of techniques from network science and information retrieval to quantify and compare temporal and network effects on constitutional change, which have been the focus of previous work. Furthermore, we propose that hierarchical effects—a set of mechanisms by which the adoption of certain constitutional provisions leads to or facilitates the adoption of additional provisions—are also crucial. These hierarchical mechanisms appear to play an important role in the emergence of new political rights, and may therefore provide a useful roadmap for advocates of those rights.Rutherford et al. analyse temporal, network and hierarchical effects to uncover, understand and quantify competing mechanisms of constitutional change worldwide.

Evidence for a scale invariant relationship between the incumbency advantage and the nationalization of US House elections 1866–2014

In a recent article, Jacobson examines the rise and fall of the incumbency advantage from 1952 to 2014. He shows that the incumbency advantage over this period rose as elections became more localized, and has fallen in recent decades as elections have become more nationalized. In this research note, we examine whether a similar relationship holds when we extend the time-series back to the end of the Civil War. Consistent with earlier work, we find that the scale of the incumbency advantage was much smaller in the period prior to 1952— approximately ranging between 0 and 4 points. However, despite this difference in scale, there remains a very similar negative correlation between the nationalization of elections and the incumbency advantage. We therefore speculate that the nationalization of elections diminishes the relative size of the incumbency advantage, but the overall size of that advantage may also be shaped by other factors, such as technology, institutional reforms, or changes in the media landscape.

How the Prospect of Non-Compliance Affects Elite Preferences for InternationalCooperation: Evidence from a 'Lab in the Field' Experiment

Uncertainty about a state’s own capacity to comply with an international agreement makes countries wary of international cooperation. There are a variety of possible explanations. That screening effect could result from the decision to avoid the costs associated with formal institutional enforcement. Alternatively, it could result from fear of informal retaliation, reputational loss, or the desire to abide by international norms. The empirical record of extensive treaty membership and high compliance offers little variation with which to evaluate these explanations. We develop an experimental survey conducted on 95 actual high level policy elites in the United States that allows us to look causally at the link between formal enforcement and decision maker preferences for cooperation under different conditions of uncertainty about their country’s future compliance. We provide the first elite-level evidence that uncertainty about future compliance with treaty obligations decreases policy makers’ willingness to cooperate by joining treaties. However, we also demonstrate that compliance uncertainty makes decision makers wary of cooperation more out of concern for the shadow of the future than for immediate threats of punishment imposed by institutional enforcement of treaty obligations. Uncertainty, rather than the costs associated with institutional enforcement, may be the driving force behind the screening effect, which is at least in part a matter of the personal dispositions of decision makers.