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Global politics has undergone a tremendous institutional proliferation, yet many questions remain about why states join these new institutions and whether they support cooperation. I build on existing work to develop a general theory of state participation in dense institutional environments that also helps to explain cooperative outcomes. I argue that states may be dissatisfied when cooperation proceeds either too slowly or too quickly and that these two types of dissatisfaction motivate opposing participation behaviors. Deepeners are states that are dissatisfied with the slow pace of cooperation and join institutions to support cooperation, while fragmenters are states dissatisfied with the quick pace and join institutions to undermine cooperation. I evaluate my argument using new data on sixty-three climate institutions and states' greenhouse gas mitigation targets in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. I find that membership in climate institutions designed to facilitate implementation is associated with more ambitious targets, while membership in general is unrelated to targets.

We present a new dataset of membership in informal international organizations—IOs founded with non-binding instruments—which constitute one-third of operating IOs. We introduce state-IO-year–level membership data for 195 countries that complements the dataset on formal IOs from the Correlates of War Project. We explain our conceptualization of an informal IO, contrast it with other approaches, and detail the data collection process. We illustrate similarities and differences across formal and informal IOs, and across states and regions. We explain how our data validate or challenge conjectures about informal cooperation that have been inaccessible for lack of data. We demonstrate that while formal and informal IOs are similar in size, the composition of informal memberships in informal IOs is more fragmented. While informal IOs are a growing part of the governance portfolios of most states, some countries and regions participate more. We conclude by outlining elements of the research program our dataset unlocks.

AbstractHow does protest affect political speech? Protest is an important form of political claim-making, yet our understanding of its influence on how individual legislators communicate remains limited. Our paper thus extends a theoretical framework on protests as information about voter preferences, and evaluates it using crowd-sourced protest data from the 2017–2019 Fridays for Future protests in the UK. We combine these data with ~2.4m tweets from 553 legislators over this period and text data from ~150k parliamentary speech records. We find that local protests prompted MPs to speak more about the climate, but only online. These results demonstrate that protest can shape the timing and substance of political communication by individual elected representatives. They also highlight an important difference between legislators' offline and online speech, suggesting that more work is needed to understand how political strategies differ across these arenas.