Governmental Preferences and the Puzzle of Autocratic Collaboration in Transnational Standard-Setting

Why do stakeholders from autocratic regimes engage in transnational governance? Various explanations of participation in transnational standard-setting arenas exist, yet none focus specifically on the mechanisms at play in closed political systems. While the ability to cooperate may be impeded due to domestic institutional constraints, transnational late-comer disadvantages may limit the incentives to cooperate transnationally. We argue that shifts in governmental preferences entice engagement in transnational standard-setting by actors originating from autocratic regimes and use a novel data-set to test our assumptions empirically. We rely on information on cooperation in internet governance, specifically the Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium, before and after a shift in Chinese governmental preference in 2007. We utilize difference-in-difference and generalized synthetic control models to show the relevance of this shift in governmental preference for the participation of Chinese actors in the IETF. Subsequently, we identify what type of stakeholder (private or public) is responsible for the participation in transnational internet governance. We find initial evidence for the argument that the good deliberated offers arena-specific incentives for different types of actors and show that it is especially private actors, compared to e.g. academic actors, which enter varying transnational arenas associated with internet governance. Our paper adds to the understanding of transnational cooperation by taking into account the influence of shifting governmental preferences and the case-specific incentives that are provided by transnational cooperation.