Chapter Fourteen: International Organizations and International Law

Walk-through

Structure-Induced Equilibria and Stickiness

          The related ideas of structure-induced equilibria and stickiness are rather vague and nonconcrete for most people. The easiest personal example for both involves thinking about your personal clothing “style” or wardrobe.

          Replacing your wardrobe entirely is very expensive. Once you have a few items in a certain style or cut or color scheme, it is easier to keep adding items in a similar vein. Adding something totally different than the rest limits the range of things you can mix and match with it. (Think of the stereotypical Hawaiian shirt here.) Your existing wardrobe helps to make your style sticky--that is, the costs of changing it often radically outweigh the short-term benefits, so change is slow and incremental. Acknowledging this stickiness often takes the form of the woman who buys an outfit because “it would look great with my ____ shoes!,” or the man who buys a certain color of dress shirt because it matches a tie that he already owns.

          College majors are also sticky. Once you start down a certain educational path, the farther you go down it, the more difficult and costly changing majors becomes. By the time you’re a late junior or a senior, you have tied your hands in terms of your major choice. Even if you wanted to, changing your major would require an enormous amount of time, money, and effort.

          International organizations are sticky too. Creating them took agreement among states; preferences had to converge enough to establish the institution. Changing or eradicating the institution or organization is very difficult because this requires preferences among the members to converge again but on something different. As a result, future leaders have their hands tied by the rules and practices and institutions that exist when they take office.

          Structure-induced equilibria exist when the rules of an institution influence the eventual outcomes. When your parents paid for your clothing, they probably had a veto (if only an implicit or rarely used one) over what you got. The structure of voting--here, your parents having a dominant say or veto--influenced the eventual outcome. Here, it prevented your style from changing drastically. If the voting rule were different--if you paid for all of your clothing yourself and your parents retained only an advisory role--then the outcome would likely be different as well.

          Leaders who think strategically recognize the influence of rules on outcomes. Choosing a major again provides a good example. A department chair who is looking to increase the number of students majoring in that department might change the requirements--the rules--for majoring in that field. Students often gravitate toward departments with easy-to-fulfill requirements,[1] so departmental enrollment would increase.

To examine how stickiness and structure-induced equilibria interact, let’s consider the case of George W. Bush and the UN Security Council. When Bush tried to obtain UN authorization to invade Iraq in 2003, he approached the Security Council; the UN rules and institutions place this body in charge of threats to peace and security. Bush had not established a reputation for supporting multilateral action through international institutions, nor had he personally endorsed the structure of the UN and its institutions. But since this institution existed prior to his taking office, and the United States was a member, and the rules of the institution said that member states had to obtain Security Council authorization to do what Bush wanted, Bush had to approach the Security Council. This institution is sticky.

Moving on to structure-induced equilibria, the composition of the Security Council includes five permanent members with vetoes, some of whom opposed the U.S. plan. France is one of those “P-5” members, and it publicly announced its intention to veto the U.S. proposal. Had the United States continued to press the resolution in the Security Council, the resolution would have failed because of the French veto. The rules of the institution, particularly the one giving France a veto, influenced the outcome.[2]