Autocracies and International Cooperation

Scholarly work on the impact of domestic politics on international cooperation has grown significantly over time. Unfortunately, there is a democratic bias to much of this literature as scholars typically focus on the relative advantage of democracies at cooperation. Our paper seeks to shed more light on the cooperation potential of autocracies by distinguishing different types of autocratic regimes. We argue that autocracies that more closely resemble democracies in the institutional characteristics that have been found to be important for cooperation (that is, greater leader accountability, limited policy flexibility, and greater transparency) should be more successful at cooperation and thus more likely to cooperate with one another and with democracies. Specifically, we expect single-party and military regimes to be advantaged at international cooperation compared to personalist systems. We test our theoretical expectations using the 10 Million International Dyadic Events data (1990–2004) and find support for our theoretical argument.