Explaining Incompleteness and Conditionality in Alliance Agreements

This paper builds on the existing proposition that audience-cost averse states, such as audience cost-averse states do not equally prefer all types of conditions, but rather these states are especially motivated to demand conditions that make the agreement more incomplete. The reason is that conditions that make the agreement more incomplete make it even easier for a signatory to avoid the costs of non-compliance, as compared with conditions that do not make the agreement more incomplete. Incompleteness introduces uncertainty about compliance requirements, giving a signatory greater ability to argue that a wider array of behaviors is compliant, including some behaviors that other signatories might view as non-compliant. If a signatory can convince audiences that more actions are in fact compliant, the signatory will be able to take a wider variety of actions, including some viewed by other signatories as non- compliant, without suffering audience costs. Signatories that wish to avoid paying the audience costs of non-compliance understand this, and are more likely to demand that treaties include conditions making the treaty incomplete as compared with conditions that do not make the treaty more incomplete.