International commitments and domestic politics: Institutions and actors at two levels (original) (raw)

2003, Locating the Proper Authorities: The …

In the last two decades, international relations (IR) scholars have responded to the parsimony of systemic theory, with its exclusive focus on interactions among states, by looking both above and below the level of states. Thus international cooperation and institutions, on the one hand, and domestic politics and institutions, on the other, have assumed important positions as both independent and dependent variables. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the interaction of international and domestic institutions, although there is no theoretical reason to presume that the two should be analytically separated. The primary exception is the two-level games literature (Putnam 1988; Evans, Jacobson, and Putnam 1993) and related work on how domestic political constraints shape international cooperation (Milner 1997) and the ability of states to make credible international commitments (Cowhey 1993; Martin 2000). Much less effort has been devoted to the reverse channel of inBuence-how international institutions constrain domestic politics. 1 This volume investigates how actors use international institutions to overcome domestic political obstacles. It addresses two principal impediments that may confound the pursuit of political goals. On the one hand, highly centralized states are plagued by commitment problems: When government power is not checked, then other actors, both within the state and internationally, cannot be sure that the policy will be maintained over time and so may be unwilling to take actions desired by the policy initiators. Decentralized states, on the other hand, face domestic veto problems because the consent or participation of key actors ("domestic veto points") is required for policies to succeed. The involvement of international institutions can potentially solve both of these political dilemmas.