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of an actor to credibly commit to bargains – we agree and apply it to the study of conquest.
Under specified conditions, powerful actors use conquest when a weak actor does not display
“assuring” institutional attributes. This builds on Fearon’s important finding by identifying actor
attributes that systematically lead to actors be unable to commit to bargains, thereby providing
falsifiable hypotheses for testing, and consequently taking his abstract theory out of the “error
term” (Gartzke 1999; see also Slantchev 2003).
The assurance framework theory also contributes to a lacuna in the institutional literature;
it takes domestic institutional structures (property rights), commonly associated with traditional
comparative growth models and links them to issues of coercion and control. This vein of
research help to address Moe’s lament of the “one-sided – and overly benign – view of political
institutions” as merely a solution to the collective-action problem (see also Moe 1990; Moe
2005: 228). This approach helps us to understand political processes, which have formerly been
studied in isolation (property rights by new institutional economists and comparative political
scientists, conquest by international relations researchers) and subsumes them under a single
model. By operating at the sub-state level, it explains state behavior by showing instrumentally
rational sovereigns responding to their political and fiscal environments, thereby providing a
plausible micro-explanatory causal mechanism at work.
Empirically, the assurance framework model explains patterns of conquest better than do
previous approaches. For example, British traders struggled under unfavorable legal conditions
in China during the 1830s, but Britain (along with other powers) coerced China into more
favorable bargains (for foreigners) as the century progressed (Fairbank 1964; Graham 1978).
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They could do so because a state apparatus was in place, and though they could have easily
defeated that apparatus in a war of conquest, it made more sense to simply coerce it into more
Convention