States as Membership Pacts

• In Event: Rethinking Sovereignty

Abstract

This paper draws on insights from theories of coalitions, social choice, and bargaining to model the endogenous relationship between war and the state. It defines a state as a restricted political coalition that is constituted by: a series of institutions that regulate membership in the state and coalition formation inside and outside of the state; and a political organization that wields exclusive authority across some territorial space. It differs from prior models of the state and of domestic politics by nesting a traditional focus on distributional conflict over material resources within a prior struggle over membership that intentionally excludes large portions of the global population. This political process of exclusion structures the content of any domestic order in at least two important ways. The first sets the national distribution of ideological interests by sorting the global population of political groups into the mutually exclusive categories of members and nonmembers. This “domestic” ideological distribution subsequently structures the collective choices of a polity, such as those over political leadership, policy, or public goods provision. Second, the sorting process also structures a domestic political order by institutionalizing its relationship with foreign actors. This institutionalization leverages external threats as focal points around which to coordinate cooperation among “domestic” actors.

In our model, a random subsample of global groups first set political boundaries among themselves by bargaining over the distribution of institutional power among groups that opt to join the membership pact. In the shadow of military conflict, they exchange offers over weighted voting rules that subsequently govern collective choices within the state. Groups eventually designated as nonmembers are assigned weighted voting scores of zero but still influence the content of bargaining outcomes through the threat of conquest (if excluded) or electoral victory (if included). Once a state has formed through the selection of its voting members, collective choices are reached through a legislative bargaining process like that specified in Baron and Ferejohn (1989) with one adjustment. Polity members make proposals that couple some division of national resources with an external focal point or threat around which to coordinate those votes. This means that the “domestic” strategic context—specifically which foreign actors are chosen as focal points—depends partly on agenda setting power and can emerge endogenously through choices made by included groups to secure more favorable distributional outcomes within the national coalition. Any domestic equilibrium (or state) can break down through an internationalized civil war when the domestic losers of an election construct a new coalition with some previously excluded foreign actor. These findings imply that stable states rest on agreements that specify their members, divide some set of national resources among those members, sufficiently coordinate public goods provision to deter foreign attacks, and forego transnational coalition formation with excluded, foreign actors.

Authors

• Patrick J. McDonald, University of Texas at Austin

• Kevin Galambos, Rhodes College