The Power of Compromise

In an era of increasingly public diplomacy, conventional wisdom assumes that leaders who compromise damage their reputations and lose the respect of their constituents, which undermines the prospects for international peace and cooperation. This article challenges this assumption and tests how leaders can negotiate compromises and avoid paying domestic approval and reputation costs. Drawing on theories of individuals’ core values, psychological processes, and partisanship, the author argues that leaders reduce or eliminate domestic public constraints by exercising proposal power and initiating compromises. Employing survey experiments to test how public approval and perceptions of reputation respond to leaders’ strategies across security and economic issues, the author finds attitudes toward compromise are conditioned by the ideology of the audience and leader, with audiences of liberals being more supportive of compromise. In the US case, this results in Republican presidents having greater leeway to negotiate compromises. The article’s contributions suggest that leaders who exercise proposal power have significant flexibility to negotiate compromise settlements in international bargaining.

Flying to Fail: Costly Signals and Air Power in Crisis Bargaining

Theories of crisis bargaining suggest that military mobilizations act as costly signals of resolve, increasing the credibility of coercive threats. In this article, I argue that air mobilizations, as a subset of military signals, demonstrate a lack of resolve during coercive bargaining for four reasons: they cost less in terms of human and financial resources (sunk costs), generate lower political costs (hand-tying), do not raise the risks of engagement (manipulation of risk), and do not significantly shift the balance of power—all compared with other military signals. Using new data that disaggregates military demonstrations into air, naval, and land signals during 210 cases of compellence, this article presents systematic evidence that air signals decrease the probability of coercive threat success compared with the alternatives. This finding holds important implications for theoretical and policy debates regarding the role of costly signals in international bargaining.

Multilevel Bargaining and the Negotiation of a Regional Trade Agreement: A Classroom Simulation

ABSTRACT This article introduces a regional trade agreement (RTA) simulation for undergraduate students. The simulation uses a multilevel bargaining framework, in which students can represent not only governments of negotiating countries but also domestic interests. By allowing students to experience international bargaining at different levels, they gain a deeper understanding of controversial international trade processes.

Those Who Knock on Europe’s Door Must Repent? Bilateral Border Disputes and EU Enlargement

This article explores a neglected aspect of the wider debate about EU enlargement: bilateral disputes between a member state and an applicant, where the former uses, or threatens to use its membership status to block the applicant’s progress in order to resolve a bilateral dispute. Through analysis of three cases – Italy and Slovenia, Slovenia and Croatia, and Greece and Macedonia – we show that the EU’s transformative power does not always flow ‘outwards’ towards the state seeking membership. This raises interesting questions about enlargement as a process of international bargaining between sovereign states filtered via a supranational entity formally responsible for negotiations. The cases suggest limits to the EU’s transformative power in the context of disputes that are linked to the meaning and significance of borders. It is not surprising that the European Commission prefers disputes to be resolved bilaterally or via a third party.