Domestic politics and international relations are often inextricably entangled, but existing theories (particularly “state-centric” theories) do not adequately account for these linkages. When national leaders must win ratification (formal or informal) from their constituents for an international agreement, their negotiating behavior reflects the simultaneous imperatives of both a domestic political game and an international game. Using illustrations from Western economic summitry, the Panama Canal and Versailles Treaty negotiations, IMF stabilization programs, the European Community, and many other diplomatic contexts, this article offers a theory of ratification. It addresses the role of domestic preferences and coalitions, domestic political institutions and practices, the strategies and tactics of negotiators, uncertainty, the domestic reverberation of international pressures, and the interests of the chief negotiator. This theory of “two-level games” may also be applicable to many other political phenomena, such as dependency, legislative committees, and multiparty coalitions.

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Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games

An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic and religious antagonisms. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s and 1960s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. These include poverty—which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment—political instability, rough terrain, and large populations.We wish to thank the many people who provided comments on earlier versions of this paper in a series of seminar presentations. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (Grants SES-9876477 and SES-9876530); support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences with funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; valuable research assistance from Ebru Erdem, Nikolay Marinov, Quinn Mecham, David Patel, and TQ Shang; sharing of data by Paul Collier.

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Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War

Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

The ‘new institutionalism’ is a term that now appears with growing frequency in political science. However, there is considerable confusion about just what the ‘new institutionalism’ is, how it differs from other approaches, and what sort of promise or problems it displays. The object of this essay is to provide some preliminary answers to these questions by reviewing recent work in a burgeoning literature. Some of the ambiguities surrounding the new institutionalism can be dispelled if we recognize that it does not constitute a unified body of thought. Instead, at least three different analytical approaches, each of which calls itself a ‘new institutionalism’, have appeared over the past fifteen years. We label these three schools of thought: historical institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism, and sociological institutionalism.’ All of these approaches developed in reaction to the behavioural perspectives that were influential during the 1960s and 1970s and all seek to elucidate the role that institutions play in the determination of social and political outcomes. However, they paint quite different pictures of the political world. In the sections that follow, we provide a brief account of the genesis of each school and characterize what is distinctive about its approach to social and political problems. We then compare their analytical strengths and weaknesses, * An earlier version of this paper WLS presented at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and at a Conference on ‘What is Institutionalism Now? at the

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Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms

This paper reviews the literature on gender differences in economic experiments. In the three main sections, we identify robust differences in risk preferences, social (other-regarding) preferences, and competitive preferences. We also speculate on the source of these differences, as well as on their implications. Our hope is that this article will serve as a resource for those seeking to understand gender differences and to use as a starting point to illuminate the debate on gender-specific outcomes in the labor and goods markets.

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Gender Differences in Preferences

This essay offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions. The model emphasizes the (economically arbitrary, from a welfare point of view) importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political representation. We explore the implications of a legislator's objective function and derive conditions under which a representative legislature will select an omnibus of projects each of which exceeds the efficient scale.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1833029.pdf

The Political Economy of Benefits and Costs: A Neoclassical Approach to Distributive Politics

Nearly thirty years of research on social choice has produced a large body of theoretical results. The underlying structure of the models that have generated these results is highly atomistic and institutionally sparse. While attention has been devoted to the mechanisms by which individual revealed preferences are aggregated into a social choice, rarely are other aspects of institutional arrangements treated endogenously. In this paper institutional properties are given more prominence. In particular, I focus on three aspects of organization: (1) a division-of-labor arrangement called a committee system; (2) a specialization-of-labor system called a jurisdictional arrangement; and (3) a monitoring mechanism by which a parent organization constrains the autonomy of its subunits called an amendment control rule. The conceptual language has a legislative flavor but, in fact, the concepts are broadly applicable to diverse organizational forms. The principal thrust of this paper is a demonstration of the ways institutional arrangements may conspire with the preferences of individuals to produce structure-induced equilibrium.

https://www.edegan.com/pdfs/Shepsle%20(1979)%20-%20Institutional%20Arrangements%20and%20Equilibrium%20in%20Multidimensional%20Voting%20Models.pdf

Institutional Arrangements and Equilibrium in Multidimensional Voting Models

Series editors' preface Acknowledgements Part I. The Context: 1. Theory, institutions, and government formation 2. The social context of government formation 3. The government formation process Part II. The Model: 4. Government equilibrium 5. Strong parties Part III. Empirical Investigations: 6. Two cases: Germany, 1987 Ireland, 1992-3 7. Theoretical implications, data, and operationalization 8. Exploring the model: a comparative perspective 9. A multivariate investigation of portfolio allocation Part IV. Applications, Extensions, and Conclusions: 10. Party systems and cabinet stability 11. Making the model more realistic 12. Party politics and administrative reform 13. Governments and parliaments Bibliography.

Making and breaking governments : cabinets and legislatures in parliamentary democracies

Using spatial theory, Shepsle and Weingast argue that the power of congressional standing committees rests on their domination of conference committees. Members of the committees originating legislation dominate conference committee delegations and know that the parent houses must approve or disapprove of conference reports without amendment. This system gives committee members an opportunity to overturn changes in committee bills that were approved on the floor and creates a disincentive for legislators to offer amendments to committee bills in the first place. This conference power is called an ex post veto because it follows floor action. Legislative committees have fascinated scholars and reformers for more than a century. Differences of opinion concerning the role of committees persist, but there is a substantial consensus on a number of stylized facts: Committees are “gatekeepers” in their respective jurisdictions. Committees are repositories of policy expertise. Committees are policy incubators. Committees possess disproportionate control over the agenda in their policy domains. Committees are deferred to, and that deference is reciprocated. There is, however, a troublesome quality to this consensus. The items in this list (and there could undoubtedly be more) describe or label committee power, but they do not explain it. Explanations of these empirical regularities require a theory. In the case of each of these stylized facts, that is, a theory is needed to determine why things are done this way.

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The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power

Professor Tullock has raised a central question in the confrontation between abstract models of PMR and majority rule as practiced in real institutions. We believe the decision making stability of real-world legislatures lies in the way these legislatures institutionalize majority rule. Logrolling, vote trading, coalition formation, and bargaining are red herrings in this argument. Rather, it is the restrictions on such legislative exchange that promote structure-induced equilibrium. Put differently, institutional arrangements place constraints on the completeness of the majority rule relation by restricting social comparisons. The framework developed here shows that an assumption implicit in the discussions of many majority rule theorists fails to hold. In part, the implicit rationale for focusing upon PMR was that results proved for this rule were presumed to hold forany institution based on PMR. In one sense this remains true, namely, that the majority rule win sets,W(x), are everywhere non-empty. In another sense, however, it is not true that all properties of institutions based upon majority rule are inherited from PMR. The theory outlined above shows that stability may not be as elusive as theorists of PMR have concluded. The concept of equilibrium developed in the last section incorporates the major features of prominent choice institutions as well as capturing the special cases in the literature cited in Section II. We now turn to a brief discussion of future work. We address the question that remains, in our opinion, the salient one in the study of institutions and their effect on policy choice, namely, understanding the factors governing the choice of one institutional arrangement over another. Throughout this paper, we have distinguished agreements that transform the rules from agreements (or vote-trades) that take place within a given set of rules. In principle, anything attainable under the former could also be attained under the latter if there were some form of mechanism to enforce vote-trades as contracts. Under such a rubric, complex legislative agreements in the form of contingent contracts achieve the desired result without resorting to the institutionalization of a rule. In practice, however, there are several problems with vote-trading agreements as contracts. First, the cost of writing these contracts is often quite high due to the number of potential contingencies for which provision must be made. Second, and more important, PMR lacks an enforcement mechanism. Individual parties to contracts in market settings have recourse to the courts. This provides protection beyond the assurance of good faith and brand names. No comparable institution exists within the legislature to supplement the natural though imperfect brand name phenomenon (i.e., that of ‘keeping one's word’ to preserve and enhance credibility for future trades). While the legislature could create a court or committee to monitor contracts and enforce agreements, alternatively, it could simply impose a rule binding upon everyone which insured the outcome sought. Of the two alternative institutions, the latter probably economizes on transaction costs, particularly for those situations that recur with some frequency. With a rule, a new contract need not be negotiated each time between new sets of players. Moreover, a contingency clause might easily be appended to a rule to cover cases where there is widespread agreement that it is inappropriate. For example, in the Congress a special majority may vote to suspend the rules (note that if only a simple majority were required, then this would be no different from PMR).
 This is the same rationale that underpins the Uniform Commercial Code and other areas of the law of contracts. To cover situations that occur quite regularly, certain standard procedures are written into the law and are automatically a part of any agreement or exchange. This significantly lowers transaction costs (contracts need not be negotiated), and in those circumstances where the standard is inappropriate, the parties may simply contract around it. Similar results occur in most areas of the common law. For further discussion, see Posner (1976).
 In sum, logrolling solutions to the problem of forging agreements are unworkable because they lack enforcement mechanisms. Logrolling, then, cannot constitute an answer to the question, ‘Why so much stability?’
 This reasoning justifies our separation throughout the text of choices within a given institution and choices among institutions. This distinction is a natural one, dating back to Buchanan and Tullock's. There they analyze separately the constitutional calculus of choice over voting rules and the behavior under a specific voting rule.
 If institutional rules are to constitute an answer to Tullock's stability question, then we must confront the manner in which those rules are chosen. There are very few theories about the choice of rules — exceptions include Buchanan and Tullock (1962), Buchanan (1975, 1979), and contributions in the property rights literature. Even in the absence of a theory, we may still worry that constitutional choice processes (the choice of rules) are vulnerable to the same instabilities found in PMR. We term this the ‘Riker Objection’ since this issue was recently posed by Riker (1980). If institutional constraints create equilibrium — that is, if transformations of a PMR institution into a non-PMR institution create a situation of equilibrium from one without an equilibrium — then preferences over outcomes lead naturally to aninduced set of preferences over institutional arrangements. In this sense, an individual prefers one institution over another if he prefers the equilibrium policy state of one over the equilibrium (or unpredictability) of the other. In the case of multiple equilibria, an individual prefers the institution that yields the highest expected utility given a probability distribution over equilibrium states (Plott, 1972). As long as preferences for policy states differ, then preferences over institutions with differing equilibrium states (distribution of equilibria) should also differ. The Riker Objection suggests that a simple extension of McKelvey's Chaos Theorem predicts endless cycles here so long as PMR governs the choice over institutions. In this sense, the existence of institutions and their stability must remain, like policy choices under PMR, tenuous — what Riker calls ‘unstable constants.’ Nevertheless, empirically we observe institutions persisting for long periods; in light of the Riker Objection, Tullock's question applies at this level as well. We may make several observations that imply an attenuation of endless cycling at the institutional-choice level. First, typically, non-PMR rules govern the choice of new rules. Second, it is risky to attempt to change the status quo contrary to the interests of those currently in control. Since failure may lead to the imposition of sanctions, expected gains must be weighed against the certainty of these sanctions. While this does not rule out changes, it will reduce the number of attempts. This is surely the conclusion to be drawn from a reading of the history of the U.S. Congress. The comparison between choice in this setting and the McKelvey world, then, is not parallel since proposals are costless to make in the latter but not in the former. Finally, there often exists a well-defined status quo alternative. In the case of the social contract, the status quo is the Hobbesian state of nature. For the case of the U.S. Constitutional Convention, it was the Articles of Confederation (Riker, 1979). In these and similar settings, even though there may be no formal rule that the status quo must literally be voted last; this restriction nevertheless may hold de facto. Consequently, the constitutional outcome is either the status quo ante or an alteration that cannot be vetoed, i.e., an element in the ‘win set’ of the status quo. With these qualifications in mind, the effect of the Riker Objection is mitigated. Even at the constitutional level, then, restrictions on the ability of individuals to make proposals may induce equilibrium.

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Kenneth A. Shepsle

Papers

The Political Economy of Benefits and Costs: A Neoclassical Approach to Distributive Politics

Institutional Arrangements and Equilibrium in Multidimensional Voting Models

Making and breaking governments : cabinets and legislatures in parliamentary democracies

The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power

Structure-induced equilibrium and legislative choice