Designing Political Order

abstract: Social scientists and political philosophers believe that the existence of a sovereign agent endowed with a monopoly of coercive force is the foundation of political order. In this article, the authors develop a formal model of anarchic competition and show that whenever it is possible to construct a peaceful political order based on a monopoly of force, it is also possible to construct one in which multiple agents maintain coercive abilities. What is more, the authors show that peaceful orders with multiple violence specialists generally require lower coercive investments than do peaceful orders with a single violence specialist. This result undercuts the notion that monopolistic domestic politics is inherently more efficient than the competitive international system. Nevertheless, the authors identify why inefficient monopolies of violence might persist—any individual agent's payoff is maximized when she serves as a monopolist who invests more in coercion than is strictly necessary to maintain peace.