how political institution help to settle disputs
Answers
Explanation:
In the absence of centralized enforcement authority, international institutions have devised a wide range of measures to enforce agreements. At one extreme, states have delegated authority to third party legal bodies to interpret and rule on compliance with authorization of sanctions to punish violations. At the other end of the spectrum, states rely upon peer pressure to encourage compliance and agree to negotiate over any differences of interpretation. Researchers have broadly explored two dimensions of dispute settlement: the variation in design of dispute settlement provisions within institutions and the pattern of state behavior within established dispute processes. This special issue pushes forward research on both dimensions while raising new agenda for probing the political determinants of institutional design and state behavior in dispute settlement. Are judges immune from the influence of power considerations in their rulings? Why do we observe electoral cycles in the pattern of case filings in the WTO? How does sensitivity to interest group pressure shape the structure of dispute settlement? In addition, the articles bring new insights from comparison across issue areas. What explains the variation of dispute design across issue areas? Does legalization of one issue area generate ripple effects that shape behavior for other issue areas? Finally, the articles hone in on critical micro-level differences within dispute settlement. Stepping beyond the issue of why states establish enforcement measures and description of the initiation and disposition of cases, the articles consider details such as the economic stakes at hand and conditions that favor resolving disputes with direct compensation.
The challenge to cooperation arises from uncertainty over compliance given incentives for others to cheat or free ride in the face of mixed incentives and collective action problems. This places dispute settlement at the heart of any theory of cooperation. Institutions work to the extent they can provide information that lowers transaction costs for actors to make and enforce their commitments (Williamson 1985; North 1990; Ostrom et al. 1992). The literature on international institutions posits that the lack of liability rules and asymmetric information contribute to market failures at the international level - states that would otherwise benefit from cooperative bargains cannot reach agreement because of the difficulty to credibly commit to comply or allocate responsibility in the case of disagreements and cheating. Keohane (1984) developed a functional theory to show the role of institutions to reduce transaction costs by providing information and mechanisms that raise the costs of non-compliance. Yet just as the transaction cost economics literature searched for institutions that provided alternatives to centralized legal enforcement, much of the study of international institutions began with an emphasis on ways that institutions encourage compliance through such mechanisms as diffuse reciprocity and reputation. These theories focus more on the role of institutions to avoid disputes than on the role of institutions to solve those disputes that occur.