Cross-National Policy Sequencing and Regulatory Interdependence

Globalization has led to a vast increase in trade, travel and exchange
of information between the advanced industrial democracies with important consequences for international regulation. Transnational firms as well as transnational terrorists have benefited. A core question for scholars of both IPE and security is to understand the conditions under which states may successfully forge cooperative regulatory agreements that can resolve the frictions that arise from such interdependence.

Dominant approaches across the sub-fields tend to focus on either
power differentials between states or the nature of domestic
institutions within them. While these arguments have made significant
contributions, they often lack the necessary precision to understand
the most difficult challenges facing global cooperation, particularly
those between powerful states of the same regime type. We argue that
an important deficiency in these arguments is that they consider
economic and security policy in isolation from one another when in
fact they frequently interact and are themselves interdependent.

To better understand the dynamics of regulatory cooperation in the
face of interdependence, we offer an alternative approach that focuses
on the cross-national sequencing of economic and security policy over
time. Scholars of comparative politics have developed extensive
theories of sequencing, examining how prior policy decisions condition
political opportunities in later periods. We develop and extend this
account cross-nationally, showing how internal policies in one
jurisdiction and in one policy domain may have knock-on consequences
for policies in the other, which in turn shape the conditions for
cooperation across polities. The stability of global cooperation is
then shaped by the interaction of domestic policy sequences as they
interact internationally over time.