Diplomatic Capacity and International Cooperation

• In Event: Bureaucracy in International Relations III: Bureaucratic Capacity

Abstract

States cooperate on a wide range of issues on a day-to-day basis, in ways that escape the attention of political leaders. We propose that much of this activity can be explained by bureaucratic politics. We argue that the extent of bilateral cooperation pursued between two states will be influenced by the capacity of the bureaucratic actors tasked with managing bilateral relations, and that the effect of bureaucratic capacity will be conditioned by the degree of oversight and attention paid by political principals. Empirically, we draw on the most comprehensive existing dataset on U.S. diplomatic personnel, from which we develop embassy-level measures of diplomatic capacity. We pair these data with an underutilized dataset of over 5,000 U.S. bilateral agreements from 1989 to 2016, as a high-frequency measure of low-level bilateral cooperation. Our analysis shows that higher-capacity embassies pursue more bilateral cooperation, at both the intensive and extensive margins, and that the effects of embassy capacity on cooperation are heightened during U.S. presidential election periods, when presidential attention on foreign policy is diminished.

Authors

• Matt Malis, Texas A&M University

• Calvin Thrall, Columbia University