International Cooperation Traps: How Information Asymmetry and Linguistic Complexity Undermine Multilateralism

Why do states increasingly forego opportunities for common-benefit international cooperation? Most approaches focus on the growing divergence of state preferences, differential effects of globalization within countries, or the emergence of new transnational cleavages. This paper offers a novel theoretical approach arguing, that the current backlash might be explained by a combination of information asymmetries between elites and voters, the cognitive costs of processing complex information about international politics, and electoral incentives. While political elites can observe the true feasibility of international cooperation, voters often cannot reliably distinguish between structural imperfections of cooperation and foreign exploitation and instead have to rely on proxy signals. Building on models of rational inattention and complexity of political information, I argue that International Organizations (IOs) and pro-cooperation elites fail in providing good signals to voters and send linguistically more complex information which is cognitively more expensive to adopt. On the other hand, nationalist political entrepreneurs who challenge the status quo have: (1) electoral incentives to exploit the ambiguity of international cooperation, and (2) lack of institutional constraints on the complexity of language they can use. They can thus use linguistically simple and cognitively cheap signals to weaponize the inherent imperfections of cooperation and frame them as evidence of the status quo regime and/or incumbent selling out the country to foreign exploitation. The paper thus argues that the current crisis of multilateralism is also driven by an information environment where rationally inattentive voters (especially those uninformed on a topic) are deterred by the costs of information and might default to the low-cost nationalist signal. They can thus trap states in non-cooperation even when the true international environment is in fact friendly. The mechanisms are illustrated through the cases of Brexit and climate cooperation using text-as-data analysis of elite communication and data from existing studies of the efficiency of simple political information. The empirical results show that IOs and pro-cooperation elites systematically use more complex language, which hinders the information adoption of uninformed voters. Overall, the paper bridges insights from political economy, party politics, and information processing to reveal a structural communication trap that might undermine multilateralism independent of true underlying preferences.