Center for Political Studies
Institute for Social Research
University of Michigan
P.O. Box 1248
Ann Arbor, MI
48106-1248

Voice: (734) 763-1348
Fax: (734) 764-3341

Winning Proposal to the Organski Scholar's Fund:
2008 Competition

Project Title: Achieving Breadth and Depth in International Multilateral Agreements: the Strategic Design of Membership Provisions

Faculty Sponsor: Barbara Koremenos

Graduate Student: Papia Debroy

Project Description

Achieving cooperation in a multilateral agreement of states with different distributional preferences, commitment mechanisms and domestic capacities to cooperate presents a puzzle to scholars of international organizations: how can divergent preferences converge such that deep cooperation is achieved? Literature in the field focuses on how states achieve such cooperation by trading off between the breadth of cooperation to achieve more depth. Yet, an empirical overview of multilateral organizations suggests that multilateral institutions can achieve both breadth and depth of cooperation. This empirical finding suggests that our understanding of the conditions under which multilateral institutions form and find success is yet incomplete. This poses the important question: under what conditions do actors create multilateral agreements and how do they design membership provisions so that actors in such organizations can achieve deep cooperation?

In this project, we seek to understand how actors strategically design membership provisions in multilateral agreements to achieve cooperation. Drawing from literature on the Rational Design of International Institutions, as well as theories of collective action and cooperation theory, we plan to build a theoretical framework for understanding the design of membership in these multilateral agreements. More specifically, we theorize that due to the types of cooperation problems states face, as well as different payoff structures for cooperation across issue area, actors will design deliberate and strategic membership provisions to achieve deep cooperation. For instance, a common cooperation problem actors must overcome in a multilateral setting is an enforcement problem: each individual state likely has an incentive to defect from the cooperative outcome because they can usually reap the benefits without paying costs to achieve that outcome when the size of membership is large. States may recognize this incentive when negotiating the design of the agreement and may therefore design a membership provision to minimize the incentive for any individual to defect. More specifically, as we see in multiple international agreements, actors may include provisions stating that specific states, or a minimum number of states must become signatories to the agreement before it will go into effect. This assures any individual state that they will not be held to the terms of the agreement unless all states are committed to "deep" cooperation.

We also theorize why membership mechanisms may differ across issue area, suggesting that the mechanisms driving states to design specific membership provisions in environmental agreements - due to the nature of the "good" being negotiated itself may differ from membership provisions in economic agreements. Because most environmental "goods" are public goods in nature, the provisions may differ from economic "goods" that do not exhibit this characteristic.

From this theoretical framework, we plan to draw out hypotheses about how the type of cooperation problem as well as the broader issue area leads actors to strategically design membership provisions. We expect that when states face a significant enforcement problem, especially in environmental agreements, they will design membership provisions that require a minimum number of states to become signatories. Due to the differences in economic cooperation and the nature of the "good" being supplied in such organizations, we expect membership provisions to require that certain states must become signatories to the agreement before the agreement comes into effect.

We plan to take two methodological approaches to examine how the membership provisions foster cooperation: case studies and a large-N statistical analysis. First, we examine the case studies to flesh out the mechanisms that lead states to design different membership provisions. In the field of economics, we examine economic commodity agreements and in the field of environmental agreements, we study such cases as MARPOL, the Ship Pollution Protocol. In following the evolution of cooperation in these cases, we can study how membership changed, and how provisions within the agreements changed incentives for individual actors to join the cooperative arrangement. More specifically, we aim to show how incentives also differ depending on the type of the good being negotiated and that ultimately the design of membership in multilateral organizations reflect these differing incentives.

Second, we continue work on the "Continent of International Law," a dataset project of randomly drawn international agreements on security, economic, human rights and environmental issues. We will collect and continue training several undergraduate researchers to gather data on membership provisions in these agreements so that we may test hypotheses drawn from this theoretical framework. Papia will be 'coding' agreements, as well as facilitating the coding amongst the undergraduate students so that we may have a sample size large enough to test our hypotheses by the middle of the summer.

Ultimately, we hope to show that states can strategically design membership to change the incentives of actors in multilateral institutions such that they do not need to trade off between the depth and breadth of cooperation, but rather that they can achieve breadth and still realize deep cooperation.