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Predicted duration of multilateral treaty ratification process conditioned to leader ideology across regime types (left) and during/after the Cold war (right)
Source publication
The existing literature argues that the left is generally more supportive of multilateralism in foreign policy than the right. However, the impact of ideology on state commitment to multilateral cooperation have not yet been empirically tested adequately. We assess the presence of such a left–right divide on state commitment to multilateral treatie...
Citations
... Not all states lacking positive power engage in their contestation; and if they do, they engage in various contestation modes. The NIPT specifies how states' negative power to avoid undesired institutional outcomes shapes the radicalness of their contestation modes -regardless of whether their original dissatisfaction stems from institutional characteristics or has other domestic or international sources (see, e.g., Borzyskowski and Vabulas 2019;Choi 2021;Walter 2021b;Dijkstra and Ghassim 2024;Lipps and Jacob 2024;Vignoli and Onderco 2024). A strong negative power endowment of both inside options to prevent and outside options to evade provides dissatisfied powers with a substitute to positive power. ...
International institutions are increasingly under attack from their member states, who embark on varying and sometimes escalating modes of contestation. At the same time, states’ negative institutional power, i.e. their opportunities to avoid undesired outcomes in international institutions, has been declining for some time. This paper claims that dissatisfied states’ negative institutional power endowments are key to understanding their varying contestation modes: the more limited (extensive) the negative institutional power of dissatisfied states in an institution, the more radical (moderate) modes of institutional contestation they will choose. We argue that, all else equal, states’ (1) inside options to prevent undesired outcomes within the institution and (2) their outside options to evade undesired outcomes by leaving the institution jointly condition whether they choose a strategy of voice, subversion, exit, or rollback to contest the dissatisfying institution. We assess the plausibility of our Negative Institutional Power Theory (NIPT) by means of four detailed case studies of the Trump Administration’s contestation of the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Paris Agreement, and the Iran Nuclear Deal. We demonstrate the generalizability of our arguments by assessing our claims across eight additional instances of other dissatisfied powers’ contesting different international institutions. The twelve case studies demonstrate that negative power matters for states’ choice of institutional contestation modes. Our findings suggest that whether, in the future, international institutions will be increasingly challenged from within and outside, can be influenced by reforms that grant (or deny) states negative institutional power.
