Suchergebnisse

International climate negotiations occur against the backdrop of increasing collective risk: the likelihood of catastrophic economic loss due to climate change will continue to increase unless and until global mitigation efforts are sufficient to prevent it. We introduce a novel alternating-offers bargaining model that incorporates this characteristic feature of climate change. We test the model using an incentivized experiment. We manipulate two important distributional equity principles: capacity to pay for mitigation of climate change and vulnerability to its potentially catastrophic effects. Our results show that less vulnerable parties do not exploit the greater vulnerability of their bargaining partners. They are, rather, more generous. Conversely, parties with greater capacity are less generous in their offers. Both collective risk itself and its importance in light of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report make it all the more urgent to better understand this crucial strategic feature of climate change bargaining.

Abstract
Foreign aid has served as an important policy tool for centuries, yet international relations research essentially treats it as a novel, post-World War II phenomenon. We argue that documenting aid-like activities in earlier historical periods helps shed new light on the systemic political dynamics of aid giving. We introduce a framework that links aid giving to the status quo in international politics and populate the framework with a diverse set of historical and contemporary cases, including Western and non-Western donors. Our analysis reveals striking similarities between the ways in which donor governments from diverse regions, historical periods, and international systems have utilised aid and other forms of concessional finance to pursue international political goals. Our findings suggest that by considering the pre-Marshall Plan roots of aid researchers can more effectively link foreign aid provision to rising power dynamics, international formal and informal hierarchies, and other research agendas in international relations. Our analysis also points to the need for greater attention to non-Western and pre-World War II evidence in understanding the link between aid and systems of international relations that have been less prevalent in the post-Marshall Plan era.

In political science, research using computer-assisted text analysis techniques has exploded in the last fifteen years. This scholarship spans work studying political ideology,1 congres-sional speech,2 representational style,3 American foreign policy,4 climate change attitudes,5 media,6 Islamic clerics,7 and treaty making,8 to name but a few. As these examples illustrate, com-puter-assisted text analysis—a prime example of mixed-meth-ods research—allows gaining new insights from long-familiar political texts, like parliamentary debates, and altogether en-ables the analysis to new forms of political communication, such as those happening on social media.

AbstractWhat effect does repeated play have on reputation building? The literature on international relations remains divided on whether, when, and how reputation matters in both interstate and intrastate conflict. We examine reputation building through a series of incentivized laboratory experiments. Using comparative statics from a repeated entry-deterrence game, we isolate how incentives for reputation building should change as the number of entrants changes. We find that subjects in our experiments generally build reputations and that those investments pay off, but we also find that some subjects did not react to incentives to build reputation in ways our model had predicted. In order to explain this, we focus on the heterogeneity of preferences and cognitive abilities that may exist in any population. Our research suggests that rational-choice scholars of international relations and those using more psychologically based explanations have more common ground than previously articulated.

What effect does cheap talk have on behavior in an entry-deterrence game? We shed light on this question using incentivized laboratory experiments of the strategic interaction between defenders and potential entrants. Our results suggest that cheap talk can have a substantial impact on the behavior of both the target and the speaker. By sending costless threats to potential entrants, defenders are able to deter opponents in early periods of play. Moreover, after issuing threats, defenders become more eager to fight. We offer a number of different explanations for this behavior. These results bring fresh evidence about the potential importance of costless verbal communication to the field of international relations.