Eric Reinhardt's Research Page

• Posturing Parliaments: Ratification, Uncertainty, and International Bargaining, PhD dissertation (New York: Columbia University, December 11, 1996).
• Nice Strategies in a World of Relative Gains: The Problem of Cooperation Under Anarchy, Journal of Conflict Resolution 37:3 (September 1993), 427-445 (with Marc Busch).
• Adjudication without Enforcement in GATT Disputes.
• Dispute Settlement Institutions and the Escalation of Security Conflicts.
• Domestic Strife and the Initiation of Violence at Home and Abroad, American Journal of Political Science 43:1 (January 1999), 56-85 (with Kurt Dassel).
• Industrial Location and Protection: The Political and Economic Geography of U.S. Nontariff Barriers, American Journal of Political Science 43 (1999), 1028-1050 (with Marc Busch).
• Aggressive Multilateralism: The Determinants of GATT/WTO Dispute Initiation, 1948-1998, prepared for delivery at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Washington, DC, February 17-20.
• Tying Hands without a Rope: Rational Domestic Response to International Institutional Constraints, prepared for delivery at the Conference on the Interaction of International and Domestic Institutions, Boulder, CO, June 4-5, 1999.
• Geography, International Trade, and Political Mobilization in U.S. Industries (with Marc Busch).

Adjudication without Enforcement in GATT Disputes.

The outcomes of disputes under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) exhibit a puzzling selection effect. Defendants are more likely to concede to plaintiffs' demands prior to GATT judgments than afterwards, despite GATT's lack of enforcement power. Yet why would states plea bargain if they know they can spurn contrary rulings? To address this puzzle, I develop an incomplete information model of trade bargaining with adjudication as an option. The model suggests an explanation. Namely, the plaintiff has greater resolve prior to a ruling, arising from his belief that the defendant may be compelled to concede to an adverse judgment, even if that belief turns out to be inaccurate after the fact. Surprisingly, this resolve induces more generous settlements even from defendants who intend to not comply should a ruling occur. After a ruling, however, this anticipatory effect is irrelevant, making concessions much less likely. The prospect of adjudication thus conditions the behavior of states even when enforcement is not forthcoming, but not through mechanisms identified by previous studies. Ironically, adjudication works best when threatened but not realized.

Dispute Settlement Institutions and the Escalation of Security Conflicts (Postscript format).

This is an application of the argument developed in the above paper to international security conflicts rather than trade disputes.

This paper examines the impact of dispute settlement institutions on the outcome of interstate security conflicts. It starts from the underappreciated idea that institutions are central in the escalation as well as the termination of conflicts. The paper presents a rationalist story of the escalation of disputes when uncertainty prevails. The argument is that as long as there is at least a small chance that states are inclined to comply with rulings by the institution, even states that do not care about rulings will be more likely to cooperate. The result is that cooperation should be more likely before a ruling is issued than afterwards. Counter to intuition, plea bargaining can occur even when the institution has no enforcement power. The paper presents some testable hypotheses that follow from this argument. A number of illustrative cases offer tentative support for the hypotheses as well. The argument in this paper strongly challenges both realist and neoliberal ideas concerning whether and how dispute settlement institutions increase the prospects for cooperation. In order to see the impact of such institutions, we must examine not those cases in which they issue injunctions, but rather those in which their involvement is peripheral or merely threatened.

Domestic Strife and the Initiation of Violence at Home and Abroad, American Journal of Political Science 43:1 (January 1999), 56-85 (with Kurt Dassel).

The idea of diversionary war, i.e., that leaders may seek to alleviate strife at home by initiating conflict abroad, is an intuitively appealing explanation in many cases. But the extensive empirical literature on the topic has generated mostly negative or mixed support for the diversionary war argument. We argue that the results have been unsupportive primarily because the literature has neglected to distinguish among different forms of domestic strife. Not all conflict at home generates conflict abroad. Further, we argue, conflict at home can motivate domestic repression as well as foreign aggression: diversionary war must be seen as a special case of a larger theory of violence. We accordingly specify the particular form of domestic strife, the contestation of political institutions, most likely to spur leaders to violence. We then statistically examine the effects of contested institutions on the use of violence at home and abroad, using panel data spanning 110 countries and 157 years. Our tests, which are cast at the level of individual states, are based on a fixed-effects duration dependent logit model. Our analysis controls for regime type and regime change, among other factors. The evidence strongly supports our argument. On the basis of this evidence, we conclude that much of the effects of regime type and regime change on the use of force is actually due to contested institutions.

Industrial Location and Protection: The Political and Economic Geography of U.S. Nontariff Barriers, American Journal of Political Science 43:4 (October 1999), 1028-1050 (with Marc Busch).

You can download the data and the unpublished appendix for this paper.

The debate over the relationship between the location of industry and the incidence of import barriers has been miscast. Three problems cast doubt on the findings reported in the endogenous protection literature. First, geographic concentration is widely used as a proxy for political concentration (i.e., the spread of industry across political districts), al-though these two variables hardly work in lockstep. Second, measures of geographic concentration typically ignore the spatial relationship among units like counties or states in which lumpy industries make their home, thereby often failing to discern concentration where it exists. Third, in those few studies in which political concentration receives any direct attention at all, non-monotonic effects and interaction terms are seldom tested, de-spite their grounding in theories of interest group politics more generally. This paper cor-rects for all three problems. The results indicate that geographically concentrated but po-litically dispersed industries are the ones most likely to receive relief from imports, al-though a handful of very large industries benefit from being politically concentrated. The paper thus reveals how to reconcile the two competing hypotheses around which one of endogenous protection theory's most enduring debates has taken shape.

Aggressive Multilateralism: The Determinants of GATT/WTO Dispute Initiation, 1948-1998, prepared for delivery at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Washington, DC, February 17-20.

You can download the data for this paper.

Why do states initiate trade disputes under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) or its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO)? Existing studies suggest that democracies should either experience fewer trade conflicts or at least resolve them more cooperatively. Other works contend that the filing of complaints itself constitutes proof of the efficacy of the trade dispute settlement regime, and that changes in that regime account for the rising number of trade complaints in recent years. This paper provides the first large-scale test of these hypotheses and others, using multivariate regression and exhaustive new data on dispute initiation within all GATT/WTO directed dyads from 1948 through 1998. The evidence contradicts prevailing explanations. It turns out that democracies experience more trade conflict, not less, and they resolve their disputes less cooperatively as well. Moreover, changes in the dispute settlement regime have had little impact.

Tying Hands without a Rope: Rational Domestic Response to International Institutional Constraints, prepared for delivery at the Conference on the Interaction of International and Domestic Institutions, Boulder, CO, June 4-5, 1999.

You can download the data for this paper.

Observers often argue that international institutions can promote policy reform by serving as a commitment device, "tying the hands" of national leaders who would otherwise be unable to reform due to opposition in the legislature, for instance. Can a leader "tie hands without a rope," i.e., if the domestic opposition is rational and knows the institution lacks enforcement power? To find out, I develop an incomplete-information game theoretic model, in which the executive and legislature of a defendant country in a World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute set trade policy. The model indicates that even leaders who know enforcement is not forthcoming (e.g., when the defendant is likely to prevail in a WTO ruling) can sometimes get significant liberalization approved by a protectionist legislature. Leaders can indeed tie their hands without ropes. However, the model's results contradict many aspects of conventional institutionalist theory. For instance, this tying hands function of the institution comes at the expense of additional gains when enforcement turns out to be more likely (e.g., when an adverse ruling is probable), so it does not add to the net expected level of liberalization. Moreover, the benefits of tying hands without a rope can only be realized before the institution issues prescriptions, and only then, ironically, if the transaction costs of utilizing the institution are sufficiently high. The model yields a number of additional testable hypotheses, concerning, for instance, the differential influence of the institution on unified and divided governments. Preliminary quantitative tests offer support for these hypotheses.

Geography, International Trade, and Political Mobilization in U.S. Industries (with Marc Busch).

You can download the data and the not-for-publication appendix for this paper.

From studies of so-called "Silicon Valley effects" to regional economic development, the spatial proximity of firms has shed new light on some of the most enduring puzzles in business and economics. Yet few studies have examined whether spatial proximity leads firms with shared interests to be more active in politics. We take up this question, examining whether geographic concentration makes industries competing for export markets or against imports more likely to mobilize politically. Studying U.S. manufacturers in 1988 and 1990, we find that for such traded industries, geographic concentration strongly increases: (a) the formation of common trade policy preferences among workers; (b) voter turnout; (c) inter-firm collaboration in the form of political action committees (PACs); and (d) individual- and industry-level investment in campaign contributions. In short, geographic concentration increases political mobilization on the part of traded industries across the board.