Preference formation around international cooperation

How do state preferences emerge in the incipient moments of international cooperation, and what lessons do such moments offer for the fate of international organizations (IOs) today? Opening the `black box' of preferences over international cooperation requires theories of how individual legislators as well as parties adopt positions on IOs, particularly in terms of their electoral and institutional incentives. The founding moments of IOs are a particularly fertile ground to examine how preferences form over IOs, as partisan preferences have yet to crystalize. We argue that contesting control over the IO between the legislator and the executive can derail international cooperation even in the presence of support from constituents, civil society, and elites. This is particularly true when government is divided. We test this argument using the speeches from the 1919 Senate debates over the League of Nations. We use a text-as-data approach to estimate the dominance of topics that reflect Congressional incentives compared with topics that reflect constituent pressures or personal ideology, particularly for senators for whom the League was low salience (as proxied by the timing of their speeches). To account for shifts in executive pressure, we leverage two different instances of Wilson unexpectedly being struck by Spanish flu (April) and a stroke (September) as shocks to the influence of the executive. Our findings suggest that even when the deck is stacked in favor international cooperation -- in terms of elite and constituent support -- Congressional politics still hold considerable power to derail these agreements. This is a work in progress.