Negotiation in the Street: Domestic Protests, Regime Type, and International Bargaining Outcomes

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how popular protests influence international bargaining outcomes. The impacts of a government’s domestic vulnerability on its foreign policy behaviors have attracted significant scholarly interest. The literature on two-level games suggests that domestic weakness can enable a government to increase its bargaining leverage by exploiting the risk of involuntary defection. Audience costs theory also contends that a democratic government can take advantage of its domestic weakness in signaling its resolve and consequently prevail in crisis bargaining. Previous work has heavily focused on political institutions as a source of executive constraints. This approach placed attention on democracies, which have strong political institutions. By contrast, the bargaining strategy of non-democracies largely remains unexplored. Confronting this gap, this study examines the role of protests as a non-institutional source of executive constraints across regime types. Domestic protests can increase a home government’s bargaining leverage when a foreign counterpart perceives them as a credible constraint. I argue that the regime type of the home government influences the credibility of protests. Specifically, I argue that protests are more effective in conducing favorable bargaining outcomes in hybrid regimes than in either democracies or autocracies. In chapter 2, I specify my theoretical argument. I discuss how two characteristics of a hybrid regime's relative openness to civil society and a national leader’s vulnerability to protestscontribute to the high level of credibility of protests. Chapter 3 tests my theoretical argument by using the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MIDs) dataset. I find that countries experiencing protests at home are more likely to achieve concessions from their adversaries at the end of MIDs. This correlation is stronger if the home government is a hybrid regime. Chapter 4 presents another large-N-quantitative analysis in the context of international border disputes, drawing upon the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) dataset. The results, however, do not support my theory. Protests are negatively correlated with the likelihood that the home government achieves concessions from a foreign counterpart. I suspect this outcome results from the regional coverage of ICOW, which primarily includes democratic countries in the Western Hemisphere. In chapter 5, I conduct archival research with primary sources from South Korea and Japan. This chapter investigates how the regime type of South Korea has mediated the effects of protests on two international negotiations between South Korea and Japan: the Treaty on Basic Relations (1965), and the diplomatic dispute on Mun Se-Gwang’s attempted assassination of President Park Chung-hee (1974). I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this study and my plan for future research in chapter 6. Based on these analyses, I argue that protests in hybrid regimes are perceived most threatening, and consequently, are most effective in inducing concessions from a foreign counterpart. This study expands research on the foreign policy behaviors of hybrid regimes by shedding a light on the role of protests as executive constraints. Also, this research carries important implications for the audience costs theory with its emphasis on the issue of credibility and a foreign counterpart’s evaluation process. Finally, this study contributes to expanding burgeoning research on popular protests and foreign policy by investigating the conditions under which domestic protests influence policy outcomes in international relations.