Cooperation, Endogenous Leadership Change, and Cheap-Talk Diplomacy

• In Event: Political Leadership and Conflict

Abstract

Recent scholarship has examined international reassurance and cooperation when states' preferences might change as a result of their interactions. 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. This paper presents a model of interstate reassurance with endogenous preferences in which decisionmakers a) incur a cost when national preferences change and b) have the opportunity to send a cheap-talk signal of their type at the outset of the game. The model shows that when the likelihood of preference change is sufficiently high, even costless cooperative signals are highly credible and reassurance becomes trivially easy. This contradicts a widespread conventional wisdom that the possibility of shifting preferences undermines credible signaling and exacerbates security dilemmas. We illustrate these dynamics at play in previously puzzling cases where states have either openly revealed revisionist goals or, conversely, where simple cheap-talk reassurances have been viewed as credible.

Authors

• Brandon Yoder, Australian National University

• Kyle Haynes, Purdue University