1991/12/01 by Duncan Snidal · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #International Development and Aid #International Relations and Foreign Policy #Global Peace and Security Dynamics
paper · doi:10.2307/2600947
Relative gains do not inhibit cooperation to nearly the extent suggested by realist theorists of international relations. The relative gains argument posits that international cooperation is limited because states worry about how well they do relative to each other rather than how well they do themselves. I examine this proposition by developing an iterated Prisoners' Dilemma model where states are exclusively relative gains maximizers. This creates a zero-sum situation and completely eliminates decentralized cooperation in the two-actor case. By contrast, the large n case is also zero-sum but relative gains have no impact on cooperation. In general, as the number of states increases, relative gains become increasingly irrelevant to the prospects for cooperation. An examination of the transition problem from anarchy to cooperation shows that initiating cooperation is also no more difficult under relative than absolute gains. Finally, relative gains are shown to be inconsistent with tight bipolarity. Thus realist theorists will have to look elsewhere to ground their theory if they wish to demonstrate the improbability of international cooperation.