We are grateful to Bumba Mukherjee for thoroughly reviewing our book. While it deals with core features of the international system—democracies and international organizations—we had no idea when we set out years ago to write Organizing Democracy that the topics would be so salient at the time of publication. From debates over the efficacy of the “Liberal Order” to the concerns over democratic backsliding to the precarious security environment of the Baltics, the book’s themes and topics are as relevant as ever.
We are pleased that Mukherjee acknowledges the book’s relevance and, indeed, labels it “bold.” But while his review is highly complimentary, he (rightfully) highlights some shortcomings in our text. Two of these we wish to address here, one theoretical and one empirical.
First, he raises a theoretical criticism that goes to the heart of our argument: What are the specific strategic benefits that established democracies can derive from—and, hence, what are their incentives for—supporting the IOs designed by democratizing regimes? Further, from a counterfactual perspective, can the established democracies obtain the proposed “gains” from new democracies even without supporting the IOs that these states create? In short, our theory offers little agency to established democracies.
This is a fair critique. The reasons some established democracies may wish to assist a democratizing state in forming an IO could be numerous—strategic, as in the case of the Baltics, or to build a sense of “democratic community.” It is important to theorize the incentives of the established democracies because their decision to provide assistance could well determine the feasibility of the democratizing states’ strategies for forming new IOs. But we focused on exploring the decision calculus of new democracies, namely, recognizing that the creation of new IOs is a core component of that calculus. Making the point that creating new IOs is a key policy option available to new democracies, and showing how creating such IOs can assist the democratizing process, was the focus of our book. But we fully acknowledge that a future project should flesh out the strategic logic of the established democracies.
Second, Mukherjee questions why we do not do more to show that a new democracy’s decision is not purely monadic, but likely dependent on the membership decisions of others. We acknowledge that our main specification could have been more sensitive to such spatial dependencies. We sought to closely follow and build on the models found in the work by Jon Pevehouse and Edward Mansfield, whose seminal scholarship inspired our project. Rather than model the spatial dependencies directly, our model contained the rather "blunt" approach of including regional dummy variables. On the one hand, this variable could be viewed as "overcorrecting" for spatial dependencies associated with IO formation. After all, most IOs are regional, and this variable will "soak up" any variance associated with regional factors. On the other hand, this does miss important nuances that a spatial interdependence variable could pick up. Moreover, the bluntness of the regional dummy means that it could pick up a host of regionally contingent factors, not solely those related to the IO membership choices of other states. This points to another useful direction for future research on the IO-democratization link.
