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

Abstract

We analyze institutional solutions to international cooperation when collective action creates negative externalities and splits the actors into supporters and opponents, all of whom can spend resources toward their preferred 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 collective vote. We identify two organizational types with endogenous coercive enforcement 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 non-coercive organization 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 on the shadow of the future, and thus is implementable when the others are not.