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Delegating diplomacy : how ambassadors establish trust in international relations / David Lindsey.

by Lindsey, David (Professor of political science), author.

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New York : Columbia University Press, [2023]

Diplomats -- United States.

United States -- Foreign relations.

9780231209335 (trade paperback) :

0231209339 (trade paperback)

viii, 367 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Diplomats and bureaucrats -- Diplomats as messengers -- Elicitation, reporting, and administration -- Diplomats and biographic intelligence -- Empirical patterns in diplomatic appointments -- The sympathetic ambassador : Walter Hines page in Britain -- The unsympathetic ambassador : James Gerard in Germany.

"Ironically, diplomats are often ignored in theories of diplomacy, or else treated as anachronistic remnants of an era when rapid communication was impossible. But individual diplomats stationed at a far-flung network of embassies can solve one of the core problems of international politics: credible communication. In Delegating Diplomacy, political scientist David Lindsey argues that diplomats can often communicate credibly even when their superiors cannot. States can, therefore, improve their international prospects by delegating diplomacy to ambassadors who enjoy special trust in their host nations. These trusted representatives provide a crucial channel of communication by lending the nation some of their own credibility through honesty and sympathy. Based on hand-coded datasets of declassified presidential daily briefs and case studies, we can see how diplomats are important to decision makers almost exclusively as intermediaries, relaying messages from one government to another. The empirical centerpiece of the book is the first ever large-scale database of biographical information on more than 1,300 diplomats built from intelligence records originally compiled by the U.S. intelligence community. This data strongly supports the theoretical sympathy mechanism, meaning that countries tend to select diplomats with known sympathies for their hosts. The quality and richness of the data opens new doorways to explore questions of interest to scholars of diplomacy. We find, for example, that politically appointed ambassadors are both more common and more competent than generally assumed. The book concludes with two case studies of Woodrow Wilson's ambassadors to Britain (Walter Hines Page) and Germany (James Gerard) during World War I. Ambassador Page corresponds closely to the ideal diplomat postulated by the theory, while Ambassador Gerard was appointed only to fulfill a patronage debt and was not correctly qualified for his role. Page was essential to the smooth functioning of Anglo-American relations while Gerard bears considerable blame for the deterioration in German-American relations. Delegating Diplomacy presents a series of empirical tests, drawing on unique and newly collected data to test the theory and illuminate delegated diplomacy"--Provided by publisher.

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