Institutions, the Illegal Drug Trade, and Participant Strategies: What Corrupt or Pariah States Have In Common with Liberal Democracy and the Rule of Law

Abstract

Institutions generate incentives that guide behavior, but many analysts and policymakers underestimate the power of institutions to affect behavior by ignoring how distinct strategies work to generate similar outcomes in different institutional contexts. This article uses the illegal trade in psychoactive substances to illustrate how outcomes (the size of the illegal drug market) across very distinct political institutions can be the same because individuals adopt different strategies in their pursuit of the same behavior: to participate in the illegal drug trade. The illegal trade in psychoactive substances represents an understudied and poorly studied issue in international relations. Arguments that focus on the deviant characteristics of governments in the developing world and organized crime to explain the trade are misleading for empirical and methodological reasons. I propose a general argument about the proliferation of the illegal drug trade that accounts for its success in countries struggling with poverty, corruption, terrorism, and pariah leaders, as well as in rich, stable democracies in which the rule of law “reigns.” The article takes factors that are often seen as distinct in explaining the drug trade (e.g., civil rights in liberal democracies and corruption in developing countries) and demonstrates that their explanatory logic represents variations on the same causal variable: the ability to conceal oneself. My insight is that the strategies used to achieve concealment vary by the institutional context in which participants find themselves.