Setting International Standards:Technological Rationality or Primacy of Power?

Walter Mattli* and Tim Bthe**

Paper presented on panel 16-15/17-13, "Global Regulatory Cooperation and Coordination,"at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association

Philadelphia, 29 August 2003

* Associate professor of Political Science at Columbia University, New York and JP Morgan Fellow at theAmerican Academy in Berlin. In 2004, he will join the faculty of Politics and International Relations of OxfordUniversity and become an Official Fellow of St. John's College at Oxford. Email: wm62@Columbia.edu.** James B. Conant Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University and PoliticalScience Fellow at Stanford University. In fall 2004, he will join the faculty of Duke University as an assistantprofessor of Political Science. Email: tim.buthe@post.harvard.edu

Abstract

Standards have become one of the most important non-tariff barriers to trade. Especiallynational product standards that specify design or performance characteristics of manufacturedgoods often inhibit trade, whereas regional and international standard increasingly also serve asinstruments of trade liberalization. Consequently, the setting of internationalstandardsseemingly technical and apoliticalis rapidly becoming an issue of great economicand political salience. But who sets these international rules? Who wins, who loses? This studyoffers a fresh analytical approach to the study of international standards, which we call theInstitutional Complementarities approach. It builds on insights from Realism and the Battle ofthe Sexes coordination game but emphasizes complementarities of historically conditionedstandardization systems at the national level with the institutional structure of standardization atthe international level. It posits that, after controlling for other factors that influenceinvolvement in international standardization, differences in institutional complementarities play acritical though largely accidental role in placing firms from different countries or regions in afirst- or second-mover position when standardization becomes global. We illustrate theinsightfulness of this approach through statistical analyses of the first scientific set of data onstandards use and standardization, collected by the authors through an international onlinesurvey.

This paper has been accepted for publication by World Politics.It is scheduled to appear in vol.56 no.1 (October 2003).