Democratic Default: Domestic Audiences and Compliance with International Agreements Michael Tomz Stanford University
[email protected] August 2002 Draft. Comments Welcome! Prepared for delivery at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, August 29 – September 1. The author thanks Sarah Dix and Diego Miranda for superb research assistance and colleagues at Gallup Argentina, Graciela Römer y Asoc., Ipsos-Mora y Araujo and Nueva Mayoría for sharing their data. Part of this research was supported by grants from the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies and the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society. Abstract This paper challenges an increasingly common claim about the relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy. Many political scientists argue that, in a democracy, domestic audiences constrain leaders to honor international commitments. I explain why this argument depends on three assumptions that are unlikely to hold in a wide range of cases. I then offer an alternative theory in which domestic audiences sometimes make compliance less rather than more likely, and I test it with a unique collection of public opinion polls about foreign debt in Argentina. The data reveal that domestic audiences prevented Argentina from suspending debt payments in 1999 but had the opposite effect two years later, when they contributed to the largest default in financial history. The results confirm the existence of a conditional, rather than direct, relationship between democratic accountability and compliance, and they suggest an important avenue for future research: investigating who favors default and when they are likely to become electorally decisive. 1 1. Introduction A growing body of literature argues that democracies are more likely than authoritarian states to honor international agreements.