Abiding by the Vote: Between-Groups Conflict in International Collective Action

Abstract We analyze institutional solutions to international cooperation when actors have heterogeneous preferences over the desirability of the action and split into supporters and opponents, all of whom can spend resources toward their pre-ferred outcome+ We study how actors can communicate their preferences through voting when they are not bound either by their own vote or the outcome of the col-lective vote+We identify two organizational types with endogenous coercive enforce-ment and find that neither is unambiguously preferable+ Like the solutions to the traditional Prisoners ’ Dilemma these forms require long shadows of the future to sustain+ We then show that cooperation can be sustained through a noncoercive or-ganization where actors delegate execution to an agent+ Even though this institution is costlier, it does not require any expertise by the agent and is independent of the shadow of the future, and thus is implementable when the others are not+ A widespread approach to explaining international cooperation that has emerged over the past twenty-five years is based on insights from the analysis of repeated games+1 This cooperation theory typically assumes that the underlying preferences of governments have the structure of a Prisoners ’ Dilemma ~PD!, which makes defection from any agreement the dominant strategy, and then shows how cooper-ative behavior can be sustained in the long run despite the absence of an agent that can enforce agreements+2 The answer this theory provides is invariably the For helpful comments on the article we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, Sebastia