Leanne C. Powner

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Consensus, Capacity and the Choice to Cooperate:

The Dissertation

This page houses information about my dissertation work on foreign policy cooperation in Europe. Click on the links beside chapter names to email me for copies of chapters; chapters will be posted when they're accepted. All documents are copyright (c) 2007-8, Leanne C. Powner. PLEASE do not cite or quote without permission. Follow my progress with the Dissertation Progress Meter below!

Summary:
The post-Cold War era has seen an explosion of growth in international organizations and interstate cooperation. Cooperation between states in an institution, however, is only one of the options that states have to address foreign policy problems. They also have choices to cooperate outside of institutions, to act unilaterally, to do nothing, or even to use a different organization. This dissertation closes the gap between studies of characteristics that facilitate cooperation and studies of enforcement of completed agreements by examining when and under what circumstances states choose ‘cooperate’ instead of other options, and then it proceeds to consider how states choose between the institutions available to them as fora for cooperation.

I argue that the choice between these foreign policy options is driven by two factors: the existence of consensus around a state’s desired outcome, and the existence of capacity in the selected forum to achieve a successful outcome. Consensus is the necessary convergence of preferences for action; the underlying structure of the cooperation problem strongly influences this, as do institutional decision-making rules. Capacity, on the other hand, is the ability to carry out the desired action. In the absence of consensus, states that have sufficient capacity to act independently and achieve their ideal points will do so. Fora in which consensus exists but capacity does not will result in declarations or other non-resource-intensive gestures.  Where both consensus and capacity exist, international organizations will be able to act.

I study support for this argument in the context of European foreign policy cooperation in the European Union, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and Council of Europe. Two chapters of quantitative analysis draw on an innovative new data set of 300 randomly selected international political events to identify and include cases of non-cooperation as well as successful cooperation, to understand how these two sets of observations differ. Quantitative chapters studying the EU and the choice between fora find fairly strong support for the consensus arguments but are unable to test rigorously the claims about capacity. A qualitative study of events in Albania in early 1997 sheds additional light on the capacity claims and on how states themselves make choices between these foreign policy options.

Committee:
Jim Morrow, chair
Rob Franzese
Dario Gaggio
Jana von Stein

Downloads:
The Complete Dissertation (239 pgs, 1.3 mb)
The empirical chapters and data collection appendix are available as separate files; links are below in the table of contents.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: A Mess, a Muddle, and a Maze
Theorizing and Explaining Foreign Policy Choice
Choosing When to Cooperate: EU Foreign Policy Cooperation in the CFSP    Chapter Available
The International Politics of Policy Choice: Foreign Policy Behavior In and Out of Institutions    Chapter Available
Preferences, Bargaining, and Outcomes in Albania, 1997   Chapter Available
Conclusions: Cooperation as Just One Foreign Policy Option
Appendix: Data collection process and coding rules for initial random event sample   Chapter Available