Jonas Tallberg: How political regimes affect international cooperation 

Photo: Niklas Björling/Stockholm University.

As a Wallenberg Scholar, Jonas Tallberg wants to study international cooperation from the late 1700s to the present day in order to investigate how countries' political regimes affect collaboration.

Whether international cooperation can survive and flourish in a time of global democratic backsliding is high on the agenda of both national governments and international organisations.

Almost without exception, previous research shows that democracies are more cooperative than non-democratic countries, autocracies. But much of this research stems from the two decades between 1990 and 2010, when both democracy and international cooperation were on the rise.

Democracy is in decline

Now, instead, democracy is in decline and new patterns are emerging, where several democracies hesitate in their support for international cooperation, while several autocracies have initiated new and expanded collaborations.

What does this development say about the previously so stable relationship between political regimes and international cooperation? Was this relationship bound in time – the result of a certain period when conditions were particularly favorable? Or are these new patterns exceptions to an otherwise robust relationship? Or was the relationship always more complex and conditional, but previous research unable to capture these dynamics because of the way it approached the issue?

Tallberg starts from the assumption that regime type and international cooperation are linked in more complex ways than previous research suggests. Overarching questions are: why, how and under what conditions do countries' political regimes affect international cooperation? 

Tallberg's project offers the most systematic analysis to date of this relationship. Theoretically, the project breaks new ground by developing a new framework to explain how political regimes can have varying effects on international cooperation. Empirically, the project is more comprehensive than previous research by examining the relationship between political regimes and international cooperation over a longer period of time and for a broader set of cooperative arrangements. 

This project provides opportunities to deepen and broaden the research that Tallberg conducts on the relationship between countries' political systems and international cooperation, and which is supported by the European Research Council and the Swedish Research Council.