Power and Strategies of Rule - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 63

against which actual policies of other states can be judged. Likewise, the ongoing presence
of the rules and institutions provides a framework for a flow of bargaining and exchange. In-
stitutions provide a forum within which states can obtain evaluative information about other
states. In effect, they provide a reliable architecture for cooperation that would be harder to
achieve without the rules and institutions. Institutional mechanisms and pathways are put in
place for states to conduct mutually beneficial transactions and cooperation. 20
In a second way, rules and institutions can also be used as more direct instruments of polit-
ical control. As Terry Moe argues, “political institutions are also weapons of coercion and
redistribution. They are the structural means by which political winners pursue their own in-
terests, often at the expense of political losers.” 21 A winning political party in Congress will
try to write the committee voting rules to favor its interests. Similarly, in international rela-
tions, a powerful state will want to make its advantages as systematic and durable as possible
by roping weaker states into favorable institutional arrangements. 22 In these instances, states
that momentarily have opportunities because of their power to set the rules do so and thereby
shape and constrain the options and choices of weaker secondary states. A powerful state
may have a variety of advantages that allow it to shape the terms of rules and institutions—it
may have won a war, or it may possess the largest and most productive economy. As such,
it has opportunities to set down the rules and institutions. Other states—those outside the
“enacting coalition”—are faced with the choice of either not participating in the institution
and losing all benefits from cooperation or participating on terms that they would not other-
wise choose. 23 The advantages that a leading state has can vary—and so, too, will the degree
to which its promulgation of rules and institutions is imposed or results from bargaining. In
these situations, rules and institutions are used not to promote efficiency and cooperation, as
such, but to shape and constrain the policies of other states.
Both these theoretical views about the uses of institutions hinge on the role that institutions
play in shaping and constraining the choices and policies of states. States are, in effect, seek-
ing to use institutional agreements to limit and make more predictable the behavior of oth-
er states. In the first instance, the rules and institutions are used to alleviate worries about
cheating and free riding. The institutional agreement provides a variety of functions that in-
crease information that facilitates cooperation. In the second instance, the effort is to lock
other states into patterns of behavior that give the most powerful state ongoing advantages.
The goal of the leading state is to translate momentary power disparities into a durable flow
of benefits. But in both cases, the reason that states seek institutional agreement is to reduce
the uncertainty of the policy choices of other states. States are seeking to make the ongoing
policy actions of other states more predictable and, by doing so, to create a more certain and
congenial environment with which to pursue its security and interests. 24
Cast in this light, states can be seen as engaged in an ongoing effort to use institutional
agreements to shape and restrict the range of policy actions of other states. The aim is to re-