Can you trust a dictator: A strategic model of authoritarian regimes’ signing and compliance with international treaties

Building on recent studies that focus on institutional variation among authoritarian regimes, this paper asks whether this variation leads to meaningful differences in the tendencies to reach and comply with international agreements. The results suggest that previous evidence regarding the democratic credibility advantage over autocracies may have been driven by a lack of a more refined authoritarian regime typology. Employing such a typology, I find that the institutional constraints that generate credibility and compliance may not be unique to democracies. In fact, the only authoritarian regime that seems to lack such features is bossism , a personalist party-based regime. Bosses are more likely than democracies to enter into international agreements, but are less likely than democracies to comply with the agreements they sign. This result is remarkably robust. Results associated with other types of autocracies suggest minor or no differences between autocracies and democracies, relating to reaching and complying with international treaties. Finally, I find evidence of strategic behavior, as all regime types are more likely to sign agreements and less likely to comply when the other negotiating party is a boss , compared with a democracy .