Democracy and the depth of intelligence sharing: why regime type hardly matters*

What explains variation in the depth of intelligence sharing? Realism provides the standard answer: shared threat motivates deeper cooperation. In a recent article, Ryan Bock offers a liberal antidote to this conventional view, leveraging insights on domestic regime type to explain why Anglo-Soviet sharing remained shallow despite the German threat during 1941–5. Several shortcomings in Bock’s innovative study undermine his main arguments and findings. A reevaluation of the Anglo-Soviet case and a cursory examination of nine other intelligence-sharing relationships during the Second World War reveal a spread of variation in the depth of cooperation that cannot be explained by a liberal regime-type argument, a realist threat perspective, or other prevailing International Relations paradigms. Marrying insights from interdisciplinary scholarship on gossip and embedded exchange, we propose a novel alternative framework that suggests plausible solutions to puzzles left behind by other accounts, thus opening a new line of inquiry for future research on intelligence cooperation.