Lost in Transmission: Bureaucracy, Noise, and Communication in International Politics

Abstract Effective communications are often the difference between whether states go to war or remain at peace. Yet decision-makers in one state frequently fail to understand what decision-makers in another are trying to say. Under what conditions do international communications fail? We argue that division of labor within government can degrade international communication by introducing transmission noise, which occurs when bureaucracies dispatch signals to foreign countries that deviate from the leader's intended meaning. The structure of bureaucratic institutions—the formal and informal rules and procedures defining how leaders and bureaucrats interact—affects the severity of transmission noise. Open institutions reduce transmission noise by improving information-sharing between leaders and bureaucrats; closed institutions increase transmission noise by impeding information-sharing and bureaucratic oversight. In short, patterns of communication within states shape communication effectiveness between states. We evaluate the theory by analyzing bureaucratic signaling processes before and after institutional reforms in India in the mid-1960s. For the cases on India's negotiations with China in 1962 and with Pakistan in 1965, we leverage sources from six countries to illustrate how sender-side institutions can degrade communication. The theory and findings emphasize the important but relatively overlooked roles that transmission noise and bureaucracy play in international communication.