Description
Existing scholarship has established that the Moscow-Washington hotline has been an informal institution built on interpersonal trust to bridge interstate distrust in times of international crises and has predicted that the trust-based function of the hotline would not be available if not used in a crisis. This paper subjects this prediction to an empirical analysis, examining the impact of the hotline’s unconventional use on the two trust domains it is linked to: interstate and interpersonal. It argues that, as predicted, in the interstate domain it will not fulfil its role as a trust-based institution. Devoid of its symbolic meaning, the hotline will revert to being no more than a communication device, pulling leaders back into the domain of interstate distrust. We also find that unconventional hotline communication also impacts the interpersonal domain by not only contributing to trust judgements but also by the nature of responses to hotline messages following the ebb and flow of the interpersonal relationship between leaders. This is not only the first analysis of President Carter’s use of the Hotline, but it also contributes to the understanding of the impact of institutional innovation on the use of informal institutions, an analysis of which is so far lacking in politics and international relations.
