Alexander Thompson
Office: 2139 Derby Hall
154 N. Oval Mall
Columbus, Ohio 43210
(o): (614) 292-9491
(f): (614) 292-1146
email: thompson.1191@osu.edu
Articles and Chapters
2006. “The Independence of International Organizations: Concept and Applications.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 60(2): 253-75. (with Yoram Haftel)
2006. “Coercion through IOs: The Security Council and the Logic of Information Transmission.” International Organization 61(1): 1-34.
2006. “Screening Power: International Organizations as Informative Agents.” In Delegation and Agency in International Organizations, edited by Darren Hawkins, David Lake, Daniel Nielson & Michael Tierney. Cambridge University Press.
2006. “Management under Anarchy: The International Politics of Climate Change.” Climatic Change 78(1): 7-29.
2003. “International Commitments and Domestic Politics: Institutions and Actors at Two Levels.” In Locating the Proper Authorities: The Interaction of Domestic and International Institutions, edited by Daniel Drezner. University of Michigan Press. (with Duncan Snidal)
2002. “Applying Rational Choice Theory to International Law: The Promise and Pitfalls.” Journal of Legal Studies 31(1, Pt. 2): 285-306.
Part of a special issue on rational choice and international law: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/jls/31/s1
2000. “Canadian Foreign Policy and Straddling Stocks: Sustainability in an Interdependent World.” Policy Studies Journal 28(1): 219-35.
2000. “International Organization.” In Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, Vol. 5: 692-722. Edward Elgar Press. (with Duncan Snidal).
Book
My book, Channels of Power: The UN Security Council and American Statecraft in Iraq, is under production with Cornell University Press. Click here for the un-copyedited Table of Contents and Introduction.
Chapter Outline
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Coercion, Institutions and Information
Chapter 3: The Security Council in the Gulf War, 1990-1991
Chapter 4: Coercive Disarmament: The Interwar Years
Chapter 5: The Second Iraq War: Down the UN Path, 2002-2003
Chapter 6: The Second Iraq War: Bypassing the Security Council
Chapter 7: Conclusion
Papers under Review and in Progress
Recent international relations scholarship has offered valuable rational choice explanations for the design of international institutions. However, the rational design literature has relied too heavily on institutional outcomes as evidence for testing models. Such studies must be complemented by research designs that analyze the decisions and bargaining that drive institutional outcomes in order to expose causal mechanisms and test a wider range of observable implications of the theory. I assess an important rational design hypothesis, that uncertainty leads to flexible institutions, by analyzing the negotiations behind the climate change regime. While the hypothesis receives considerable support, significant behavior in the process of institutional design does not conform to rational design logic. I propose various theoretical refinements for rational design theory in general and work on uncertainty and flexibility in particular. Rational choice theory speaks to the process of institutional design and should not content itself with predicting—and testing itself against—equilibrium outcomes.
Submitted as the part of the volume Principals or Principles? Theoretical Synthesis in the Study of International Organizations, edited by Michael Tierney and Catherine Weaver. Under review at Cornell University Press.
With heightened concern over the proliferation of WMD, multilateral weapons inspections under the auspices of the UN provide an increasingly important alternative to war. Borrowing insights from principal-agent theory, I analyze the Iraq inspections case of the 1990s to derive lessons for both theory and policy. I show that the Security Council (the principal) undermined UNSCOM (its agent) by providing insufficient resources, by displaying inadequate unity and resolve, and by directly subverting the inspections process. This suggests that those interested in applying theories of delegation to international security institutions should focus as much on “principal problems” as on traditional agency problems, and more generally that our tendency to blame IO agents for poor outcomes may be misplaced. For multilateral inspections to succeed, I recommend that concerned states plan for shorter interventions and endow inspectors with sufficient resources from the start, before political momentum is lost. I also suggest that more independent IOs are most likely to be successful at conducting intrusive inspections.
The existing literature on delegation to international organizations (IOs) does not sufficiently explore the domestic political reasons for why governments have incentives to transfer authority to the international level. In comparison to other domestic actors, Executives benefit disproportionately when issues are managed through IOs since they act as the state’s representative at the international level. In various ways delegation strengthens the hand of the Executive relative to legislatures and special interests. This helps explain why even powerful states delegate to constraining IOs: for Executives, a loss of relative influence and bargaining power at the international level might be offset by increased leverage at the domestic level. This paper illustrates these points by showing how domestic political conflict between the U.S. President and Congress helps explain the nature and timing of WTO legalization.
While it is widely recognized that IOs often produce ineffective results or unintended consequences, the IO literature is underdeveloped in its ability to explain why this occurs—and why other IOs seem to perform quite well. Why do some IOs perform better than others? What are the determinants of IO performance? Finding answers to these questions requires us to engage in the more fundamental task of conceptualizing and measuring performance in ways that shed light on particular IOs while allowing us to generalize across them. This paper proposes an initial framework for understanding important aspects of performance. We examine how it has been addressed (mostly indirectly) in the IO literature, offer a conceptualization of performance as applied to IOs, and suggest several analytical tools as a starting point.
This paper is part of a collaborative project that began with an ISA Venture Research Workshop at the 2008 ISA meeting in San Francisco. The link above takes you to the workshop website.
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“Multi-Lateralisms: Explaining Variation in Regime Instruments” (with Daniel Verdier)
Different international regimes are built from instruments that vary in terms of whether they are multilateral, bilateral or unilateral. Why do regimes vary in terms of their " lateralism"? In this paper we investigate, theoretically and empirically, the reasons for such variation. Our explanation is driven by three key variables: externalities, transaction costs and agent surplus. We develop a formal model to capture the logic behind these institutional outcomes and illustrate our argument by analyzing several prominent regimes that display variation in lateralism, including the currency regime, the FDI regime, the trade regime, and the climate change regime.
Some treaties are signed and then ratified quickly while others languish in legal limbo, unsigned by one or more parties. What explains this variation in the time passed between signature and ratification? The international relations literature has not taken the ratification stage of formal cooperation seriously enough, despite its obvious importance from both a legal perspective (treaties are not binding until they are ratified) and a political perspective (an unratified legal commitment may not be credible and thus may not produce salutary effects). In this project, which is at an early stage, we examine the more than 2500 bilateral investment treaties—designed to ease barriers to foreign direct investment and guarantee legal rights for investors—to explain variation in time between signature and mutual ratification. We propose various hypotheses based on domestic-level institutions and the design of the agreements themselves, which we will test with a dataset (under construction) and case studies of important ratification episodes.
Scholars of international relations frequently borrow theoretical arguments from lower levels of human activity. I identify two modes by which such ‘scaling up’ is conducted: the use of analogies and metaphors, and the borrowing of more complex models and theories. While this practice can be fruitful, scaling up threatens what I term multi-scale validity in three ways. First, an aggregation problem occurs when we treat states as actors. Second, concepts and mechanisms may no longer be appropriate in the social context of a new domain. Third, changes in the substantive nature of issues makes the use of apparently similar theories misleading when transferred to the international level. I use examples from the literature on international cooperation and institutions to illustrate both the practice of scaling up and the potential problems.
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“Industrial Country Mitigation Policy and Resource Transfers to Developing Countries: Improving and Expanding Greenhouse Gas Offsets” (with Andrew Keeler)
This paper is being prepared for the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements. We offer a proposal for expanding the use of greenhouse gas offsets, whereby industrialized countries generate emissions reductions by investing in projects in the developing world. Our proposal specifically takes into account the interests of both rich and poor countries and suggests a far broader range of activities than are currently counted under the Clean Development Mechanism. We also emphasize long-term change and investments over more narrow efforts to meet short-term targets.
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“Guarding the Equilibrium: Regime Management and the WTO” (with Duncan Snidal)
A new version of this paper is coming soon.
