Diplomacy domestic politics really determine international relations,

Diplomacy domestic politics really determine international relations,

Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games Robert D. Putnam International Organization, Vol.

42, No. 3. (Summer, 1988), pp. 427-460.

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Putnam Introduction: the entanglements of domestic and international politics Domestic politics and international relations are often somehow entangled, but our thkories have not yet sorted out the puzzling tangle. It is fruitless to debate whether domestic politics really determine international relations, or the reverse. The answer to that question is clearly “Both, sometimes. The more interesting questions are “When? ” and “How? ” This article offers a theoretical approach to this issue, but I begin with a story that illustrates the puzzle. One illuminating example of how diplomacy and domestic politics can become entangled culminated at the Bonn summit conference of 1978. ‘ In the mid-1970s, a coordinated program of global reflation, led by the “locomotive” economies of the United States, Germany, and Japan, had been proposed to foster Western recovery from the first oil shock. This proposal An earlier version of this article was delivered at the 1986 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

For criticisms and suggestions, I am indebted to Robert Axelrod, Nicholas Bayne, Henry Brady, James A. Caporaso, Barbara Crane, Ernst B. Haas, Stephan Haggard, C. Randall Henning, Peter B.

Kenen, Robert 0 . Keohane, Stephen D. Krasner, Jacek Kugler, Lisa Martin, John Odell, Robert Powell, Kenneth A. Shepsle, Steven Stedman, Peter Yu, members of research seminars at the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and Harvard, and two anonymous reviewers.

I am grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for enabling me to complete this research. 1. The following account is drawn from Robert D. Putnam and C.

Randall Henning, “The Bonn Summit of 1978: How Does International Economic Policy Coordination Actually Work? ” Brookings Discussion Papers in International Economics, no. 53 (Washington, D. C. : Brookings Institution, October 1986), and Robert D. Putnam and Nicholas Bayne, Hanging Together: Cooperation and Conflict in the Seven-Power Summits, rev.

ed. (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 2-94. 2. Among interdependent economies, most economists believe, policies can often be more effective if they are internationally coordinated.

For relevant citations, see Putnam and Bayne, Hanging Together, p. 24. International Organization 42, 3, Summer 1988 0 1988 by the World Peace Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 428 International Organization had received a powerful boost from the incoming Carter administration and was warmly supported by the weaker countries, as well as the Organization forEconomic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and many private economists, who argued that it would overcome international payments imbalances and speed growth all around.

On the other hand, the Germans and the Japanese protested that prudent and successful economic managers should not be asked to bail out spendthrifts. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter’s ambitious National Energy Program remained deadlocked in Congress, while Helmut Schmidt led a chorus of complaints about the Americans’ uncontrolled appetite for imported oil and their apparent unconcern about the falling dollar.All sides conceded that the world economy was in serious trouble, but it was not clear which was more to blame, tight-fisted German and Japanese fiscal policies or slack-jawed U.

S. energy and monetary policies. At the Bonn summit, however, a comprehensive package deal was approved, the clearest case yet of a summit that left all participants happier than when they arrived. Helmut Schmidt agreed to additional fiscal stimulus, amounting to 1 percent of GNP, Jimmy Carter committed himself to decontrol domestic oil prices by the end of 1980, and Takeo Fukuda pledged new efforts to reach a 7 percent growth rate.Secondary elements in the Bonn accord included French and British acquiescence in the Tokyo Round trade negotiations; Japanese undertakings to foster import growth and restrain exports; and a generic American promise to fight inflation.

All in all, the Bonn summit produced a balanced agreement of unparalleled breadth and specificity. More remarkably, virtually all parts of the package were actually implemented. Most observers at the time welcomed the policies agreed to at Bonn, although in retrospect there has been much debate about the economic wisdom of this package deal.However, my concern here is not whether the deal was wise economically, but how it became possible politically. My research suggests, first, that the key governments at Bonn adopted policies different from those that they would have pursued in the absence of international negotiations, but second, that agreement was possible only because a powerful minority within each government actually favored on domestic grounds the policy being demanded internationally. Within Germany, a political process catalyzed by foreign pressures was surreptitiously orchestrated by expansionists inside the Schmidt government.Contrary to the public mythology, the Bonn deal was not forced on a reluctant or “altruistic” Germany.

In fact, officials in the Chancellor’s Office and the Economics Ministry, as well as in the Social Democratic party and the trade unions, had argued privately in early 1978 that further stimulus was domestically desirable, particularly in view of the approaching 1980 elections. However, they had little hope of overcoming the opposition of the Finance Ministry, the Free Democratic party (part of the government coalition), and the business and banking community, especially the leader-Diplomacy and domestic politics 429 ship of the Bundesbank. Publicly, Helmut Schmidt posed as reluctant to the end. Only his closest advisors suspected the truth: that the chancellor “let himself be pushed” into a policy that he privately favored, but would have found costly and perhaps impossible to enact without the summit’s package deal. Analogously, in Japan a coalition of business interests, the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MITI), the Economic Planning Agency, and some expansion-minded politicians within the Liberal Democratic Party pushed for additional domestic stimulus, using U. S. ressure as one of their prime arguments against the stubborn resistance of the Ministry of Finance (MOF).

Without internal divisions in Tokyo, it is unlikely that the foreign demands would have been met, but without the external pressure, it is even more unlikely that the expansionists could have overridden the powerful MOF. “Seventy percent foreign pressure, 30 percent internal politics,” was the disgruntled judgment of one MOF insider. “Fifty-fifty,” guessed an official from MITI.

3 In the American case, too, internal politicking reinforced, and was reinforced by, the international pressure.During the summit preparations American negotiators occasionally invited their foreign counterparts to put more pressure on the Americans to reduce oil imports. Key economic officials within the administration favored a tougher energy policy, but they were opposed by the president’s closest political aides, even after the summit.

Moreover, congressional opponents continued to stymie oil price decontrol, as they had under both Nixon and Ford. Finally, in April 1979, the president decided on gradual administrative decontrol, bringing U. S.

prices up to world levels by October 1981.His domestic advisors thus won a postponement of this politically costly move until after the 1980 presidential election, but in the end, virtually every one of the pledges made at Bonn was fulfilled. Both proponents and opponents of decontrol agree that the summit commitment was at the center of the administration’s heated intramural debate during the winter of 1978-79 and instrumental in the final d e ~ i s i o n . ~ In short, the Bonn accord represented genuine international policy coordination. Significant policy changes were pledged and implemented by the key participants.Moreover-although this counterfactual claim is necessarily harder to establish-those policy changes would very probably not have been pursued (certainly not the same scale and within the same time frame) in the absence of the international agreement. Within each country, one faction supported the policy shift being demanded of its country inter3.

For a comprehensive account of the Japanese story, see I. M. Destler and Hisao Mitsuyu, “Locomotives on Different Tracks: Macroeconomic Diplomacy, 1977-1979,” in I. M. Destler and Hideo Sato, eds.

, Coping with U. S. -Japanese Economic Conjicts (Lexington, Mass. Heath, 1982).

4. For an excellent account of U. S.

energy policy during this period, see G. John Ikenberry, “Market Solutions for State Problems: The International and Domestic Politics of American Oil Decontrol,” International Organization 42 (Winter 1988). 430 International Organization nationally, but that faction was initially outnumbered. Thus, international pressure was a necessary condition for these policy shifts. On the other hand, without domestic resonance, international forces would not have sufficed to produce the accord, no matter how balanced and intellectually persuasive the overall package.In the end, each leader believed that what he was doing was in his nation’s interest-and probably in his own political interest, too, even though not all his aides agreed. 5 Yet without the summit accord he probably would not (or could not) have changed policies so easily.

In that sense, the Bonn deal successfully meshed domestic and international pressures. Neither a purely domestic nor a purely international analysis could account for this episode. Interpretations cast in terms either of domestic causes and international effects (“Second ImageH6)or of international causes and domestic effects (“Second Image R e ~ e r s e ” ~ ) would represent merely “partial equilibrium” analyses and would miss an important part of the story, namely, how the domestic politics of several countries became entangled via an international negotiation. The events of 1978 illustrate that we must aim instead for “general equilibrium” theories that account simultaneously for the interaction of domestic and international factors.

This article suggests a conceptual framework for understanding how diplomacy and domestic politics interact. Domestic-international entanglements: the state of the artMuch of the existing literature on relations between domestic and international affairs consists either of ad hoc lists of countless “domestic influences” on foreign policy or of generic observations that national and international affairs are somehow “linked. “s James Rosenau was one of the first scholars to call attention to this area, but his elaborate taxonomy of “linkage politics” generated little cumulative research, except for a flurry of work correlating domestic and international “conflict b e h a ~ i o r . ~ A second stream of relevant theorizing began with the work by Karl 5. It is not clear whether Jimmy Carter fully understood the domestic implications of his Bonn pledge at the time. See Putnam and Henning, “The Bonn Summit,” and Ikenberry, “Market Solutions for State Problems. ” 6.

Kenneth N . Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). 7. Peter Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics,” International Organization 32 (Autumn 1978), pp. 81-911. 8. I am indebted to Stephan Haggard for enlightening discussions about domestic influences on international relations.

9. James Rosenau, “Toward the Study of National-International Linkages,” in his Linkage Politics: Essays on the Convergence of National and International Systems (New ~ d r k Free : Press, 1969), as well as his “Theorizing Across Systems: Linkage Politics Revisited,” in Jonathan Wilkenfeld, ed. , Conflict Behavior and Linkage Politics (New York: David McKay, 1973), especially p.

49.Diplomacy and domestic politics 431 Deutsch and Ernst Haas on regional integration. 1° Haas, in particular, emphasized the impact of parties and interest groups on the process of European integration, and his notion of “spillover” recognized the feedback between domestic and international developments.

However, the central dependent variable in this work was the hypothesized evolution of new supranational institutions, rather than specific policy developments, and when European integration stalled, so did this literature.The intellectual heirs of this tradition, such as Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, emphasized interdependence and transnationalism, but the role of domestic factors slipped more and more out of focus, particularly as the concept of international regimes came to dominate the subfield. ” The “bureaucratic politics” school of foreign policy analysis initiated another promising attack on the problem of domestic-international interaction. As Graham Allison noted, “Applied to relations between nations, the bureaucratic politics model directs attention to intra-national games, the overlap of which constitutes international relations. 12 Nevertheless, the nature of this “overlap” remained unclarified, and the theoretical contribution of this literature did not evolve much beyond the principle that bureaucratic interests matter in foreign policymaking. More recently, the most sophisticated work on the domestic determinants of foreign policy has focused on “structural” factors, particularly “state strength. ” The landmark works of Peter Katzenstein and Stephen Krasner, for example, showed the importance of domestic factors in foreign economic policy.

Katzenstein captured the essence of the problem: “The main purpose of all strategies of foreign economic policy is to make domestic policies compatible with the international political economy. “13 Both authors stressed the crucial point that central decision-makers (“the state”) must be concerned simultaneously with domestic and international pressures. 10. Karl W. Deutsch et al. , Political Community in the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) and Ernst B.

Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces, 1950-1957 (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1958). 11.

Robert 0 . Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977). On the regime literature, including its neglect of domestic factors, see Stephan Haggard and Beth Simmons, “Theories of International Regimes,” International Organization 41 (Summer 1987), pp. 491-517. 12.

Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), p. 149. 13. Peter J. Katzenstein, ed.

Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 4. See also Katzenstein, “International Relations and Domestic Structures: Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States,” International Organization 30 (Winter 1976), pp.

1-45; Stephen D. Krasner, “United States Commercial and Monetary Policy: Unravelling the Paradox of External Strength and Internal Weakness,” in Katzenstein, Between Power and Plenty, pp. 51-87; and Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.

S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 432 International Organization More debatable, however, is their identification of “state strength” as the key variable of interest. Given the difficulties of measuring “state strength,” this approach courts tautology,14 and efforts to locate individual countries on this ambiguous continuum have proved problematic. 15 “State strength,” if reinterpreted as merely the opposite of governmental fragmentation, is no doubt of some interest in the comparative study of foreign policy.

However, Gourevitch is quite correct to complain that “the strong state-weak state argument suggests that . . . the identity of the governing coalition does not matter.

This is a very apolitical argument. “16 Moreover, because “state structures” (as conceived in this literature) vary little from issue to issue or from year to year, such explanations are ill-suited for explaining differences across issues or across time (unless “time” is measured in decades or centuries).A more adequate account of the domestic determinants of foreign policy and international relations must stress politics: parties, social classes, interest groups (both economic and noneconomic), legislators, and even public opinion and elections, not simply executive officials and institutional arrangements . I7 Some work in the “state-centric” genre represents a unitary-actor model run amok. “The central proposition of this paper,” notes one recent study, “is that the state derives its interests from and advocates policies consistent with the international system at all times and under all c i r c ~ m s t a n c e s .

In~ ~ fact, on nearly all important issues “central decision-makers” disagree about what the national interest and the international context demand. Even if we arbitrarily exclude the legislature from “the state” (as much of this literature does), it is wrong to assume that the executive is unified in its views. Certainly this was true in none of the states involved in the 1978 negotiations.

What was “the” position of the German or Japanese state on macroeconomic policy in 1978, or of the American state on energy policy?If the term “state” is to be used to mean “central decision-makers,” we should treat it as a plural noun: not “the state, it . . . ” but “the state, they . .

. ” Central executives have a special role in mediating domestic and international pressures precisely because they are directly exposed to both spheres, not because 14. For example, see Krasner, “United States Commercial and Money Policy,” p.

55: “The central analytic characteristic that determines the ability of a state to overcome domestic resistance is its strength in relation to its own society. ” 15.Helen Milner, “Resisting the Protectionist Temptation: Industry and the Making of Trade Policy in France and the United States during the 1970s,” International Organization 41 (Autumn 1987), pp.

639-65. 16. Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed,” p. 903. 17. In their more descriptive work, “state-centric” scholars are often sensitive to the impact of social and political conflicts, such as those between industry and finance, labor and business, and export-oriented versus import-competing sectors.

See Katzenstein, Between Pqwer and Plenty, pp. 333-36, for example. 18.

David A.Lake, “The State as Conduit: The International Sources of National Political Action,” presented at the 1984 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, p. 13. Diplomacy and domestic politics 433 they are united on all issues nor because they are insulated from domestic politics. ~ h u s ‘ t,he state-centric literature is an uncertain foundation for theorizing about how domestic and international politics interact. More interesting are recent works about the impact of the international economy on domestic politics and domestic economic policy, such as those by Alt, Evans, Gourevitch, and Katzenstein. 9 These case studies, representing diverse methodological approaches, display a theoretical sophistication on the international-to-domestic causal connection far greater than is characteristic of comparable studies on the domestic-to-international half of the loop.

Nevertheless, these works do not purport to account for instances of reciprocal causation, nor do they examine cases in which the domestic politics of several countries became entangled internationally.In short, we need to move beyond the mere observation that domestic factors influence international affairs and vice versa, and beyond simple catalogs of instances of such influence, to seek theories that integrate both spheres, accounting for the areas of entanglement between them. Two-level games: a metaphor for domestic-international interactions Over two decades ago Richard E. Walton and Robert B. McKersie offered a “behavioral theory” of social negotiations that is strikingly applicable to international conflict and c o ~ p e r a t i o nThey pointed out, as all experienced .

~ negotiators know, that the unitary-actor assumption is often radically misleading. As Robert Strauss said of the Tokyo Round trade negotiations: “During my tenure as Special Trade Representative, I spent as much time negotiating with domestic constituents (both industry and labor) and members of the U. S.

Congress as I did negotiating with our foreign trading partners. “21 19. James E. Alt, “Crude Politics: Oil and the Political Economy of Unemployment in Britain and Norway, 1970-1985,” British Journal of Political Science 17 (April 1987), pp. 149-99; Peter B.

Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1986); Peter J. Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1985). 20. Richard E. Walton and Robert B. McKersie, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations: An Analysis of a Social Interaction System (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). 21. Robert S . Strauss, “Foreword,” in Joan E.Twiggs, The Tokyo Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations: A Case Study in Building Domestic Support for Diplomacy (Washington, D. C. : Georgetown University Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 1987), p. vii. Former Secretary of Labor John Dunlop is said to have remarked that “bilateral negotiations usually require three agreements-one across the table and one on each side of the table,” as cited in Howard Raiffa, The Art and Science of Negotiation (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 166. 434 International Organization The politics of many international negotiations can usefully be conceived as a two-level game.At the national level, domestic groups pursue their interests by pressuring the government to adopt favorable policies, and politicians seek power by constructing coalitions among those groups. At the international level, national governments seek to maximize their own ability to satisfy domestic pressures, while minimizing the adverse consequences of foreign developments. Neither of the two games can be ignored by central decision-makers, so long as their countries remain interdependent, yet sovereign. Each national political leader appears at both game boards.Across the international table sit his foreign counterparts, and at his elbows sit diplomats and other international advisors. Around the domestic table behind him sit party and parliamentary figures, spokespersons for domestic agencies, representatives of key interest groups, and the leader’s own political advisors. The unusual complexity of this two-level game is that moves that are rational for a player at one board (such as raising energy prices, conceding territory, or limiting auto imports) may be impolitic for that same player at the other board. Nevertheless, there are powerful incentives for consistency between the two games.Players (and kibitzers) will tolerate some differences in rhetoric between the two games, but in the end either energy prices rise or they don’t. The political complexities for the players in this two-level game are staggering. Any key player at the international table who is dissatisfied with the outcome may upset the game board, and conversely, any leader who fails to satisfy his fellow players at the domestic table risks being evicted from his seat. On occasion, however, clever players will spot a move on one board that will trigger realignments on other boards, enabling them to achieve otherwise unattainable objectives.This “two-table” metaphor captures the dynamics of the 1978 negotiations better than any model based on unitary national actors. Other scholars have noted the multiple-game nature of international relations. Like Walton and McKersie, Daniel Druckman has observed that a negotiator “attempts to build a package that will be acceptable both to the other side and to his bureaucracy. ” However, Druckman models the domestic and ,international processes separately and concludes that “the interaction between the processes . . . remains a topic for i n v e s t i g a t i ~ n . ~ ~ Robert Axelrod has proposed a “Gamma paradigm,” in which the U. S. president pursues policies vis-a-vis the Soviet Union with an eye towards maximizing his popularity at home. However, this model disregards domestic 22. Daniel Druckman, “Boundary Role Conflict: Negotiation as Dual Responsiveness,” in I. William Zartman, ed. , The Negotiation Process: Theories and Applications (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978), pp. 100-101, 109. For a review of the social-psychological literature on bargainers as representatives, see Dean G.Pruitt, Negotiation Behavior (New York: Academic Press, 1981), pp. 41-43. Diplomacy and domestic politics 435 cleavages, and it postulates that one of the international actors-the Soviet leaderspip-cares only about international gains and faces no domestic constraint while the other-the U. S. president-cares only about domestic gains, except insofar as his public evaluates the international c o m p e t i t i ~ nProb. ~~ ably the most interesting empirically based theorizing about the connection between domestic and international bargaining is that of Glenn Snyder and Paul Diesing.Though working in the neo-realist tradition with its conventional assumption of unitary actors, they found that, in fully half of the crises they studied, top decision-makers were not unified. They concluded that prediction of international outcomes is significantly improved by understanding internal bargaining, especially with respect to minimally acceptable compromises . 24 Metaphors are not theories, but I am comforted by Max Black’s observation that “perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra; and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra. 25 Formal analysis of any game requires well-defined rules, choices, payoffs, players, and information, and even then, many simple twoperson, mixed-motive games have no determinate solution. Deriving analytic solutions for two-level games will be a difficult challenge. In what follows I hope to motivate further work on that problem. Towards a theory of ratification: the importance of “win-sets” Consider the following stylized scenario that might apply to any two-level game.Negotiators representing two organizations meet to reach an agreement between them, subject to the constraint that any tentative agreement must be ratified by their respective organizations. The negotiators might be heads of government representing nations, for example, or labor and management representatives, or party leaders in a multiparty coalition, or a finance minister negotiating with an IMF team, or leaders of a House-Senate conference committee, or ethnic-group leaders in a consociational democracy.For the moment, we shall presume that each side is represented by a single leader or “chief negotiator,” and that this individual has no indepen23. Robert Axelrod, “The Gamma Paradigm for Studying the Domestic Influence on Foreign Policy,” prepared for delivery at the 1987 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association. 24. Glenn H. Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict Among Nations: Bargaining, Decision Making, and System Structure in International Crises (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 510-25. 5. Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, N . Y . : Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 242, as cited in Duncan Snidal, “The Game Theory of International Politics,” World Politics 38 (October 1985), p. 36n. 436 International Organization dent policy preferences, but seeks simply to achieve an agreement that will be attractive to his constituent^. ^^ It is convenient analytically to decompose the process into two stages: 1. bargaining between the negotiators, leading to a tentative agreement; call that Level I. 2. eparate discussions within each group of constituents about whether to ratify the agreement; call that Level 11. This sequential decomposition into a negotiation phase and a ratification phase is useful for purposes of exposition, although it is not descriptively accurate. In practice, expectational effects will be quite important. There are likely to be prior consultations and bargaining at Level I1 to hammer out an initial position for the Level I negotiations. Conversely, the need for Level I1 ratification is certain to affect the Level I bargaining.In fact, expectations of rejection at Level I1 may abort negotiations at Level I without any formal action at Level 11. For example, even though both the American and Iranian governments seem to have favored an arms-for-hostages deal, negotiations collapsed as soon as they became public and thus liable to de facto “ratification. ” In many negotiations, the two-level process may be iterative, as the negotiators try out possible agreements and probe their constituents’ views. In more complicated cases, as we shall see later, the constituents’ views may themselves evolve in the course of the negotiations.Nevertheless, the requirement that any Level I agreement must, in the end, be ratified at Level I1 imposes a crucial theoretical link between the two levels. “Ratification” may entail a formal voting procedure at Level 11, such as the constitutionally required two-thirds vote of the U. S. Senate for ratifying treaties, but I use the term generically to refer to any decision-process at Level I1 that is required to endorse or implement a Level I agreement, whether formally or informally.It is sometimes convenient to think of ratification as a parliamentary function, but that is not essential. The actors at Level I1 may represent bureaucratic agencies, interest groups, social classes, or even “public opinion. ” For example, if labor unions in a debtor country withhold necessary cooperation from an austerity program that the government has negotiated with the IMF, Level I1 ratification of the agreement may be said to have failed; ex ante expectations about that prospect will surely influence the Level I negotiations between the government and the IMF.Domestic ratification of international agreements might seem peculiar to democracies. As the German Finance Minister recently observed, “The limit of expanded cooperation lies in the fact that we are democracies, ~ n we d 26. To avoid unnecessary complexity, my argument throughout is phrased in terms of a single chief negotiator, although in many cases some of his responsibilities may be delegated to aides. Later in this article I relax the assumption that the negotiator has no independent preferences.Diplomacy and domestic politics 437 need to secure electoral majorities at home. “27 However, ratification need not be “democratic” in any normal sense. For example, in 1930 the Meiji Constitbtion was interpreted as giving a special role to the Japanese military in the ratification of the London Naval Treaty;28and during the ratification of any agreement between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, presumably the IRA would throw its power onto the scales.We need only stipulate that, for purposes of counting “votes” in the ratification process, different forms of political power can be reduced to some common denominator. The only formal constraint on the ratification process is that since the identical agreement must be ratified by both sides, a preliminary Level I agreement cannot be amended at Level I1 without reopening the Level I negotiations. In other words, final ratification must be simply “voted” up or down; any modification to the Level I agreement counts as a rejection, unless that modification is approved by all other parties to the agreement. 9 Congresswoman Lynn Martin captured the logic of ratification when explaining her support for the 1986 tax reform bill as it emerged from the conference committee: “As worried as I am about what this bill does, I am even more worried about the current code. The choice today is not between this bill and a perfect bill; the choice is between this bill and the death of tax reform. “30 Given this set of arrangements, we may define the “win-set” for a given Level I1 constituency as the set of all possible Level I agreements that would “winH-that is, gain the necessary majority among the onstituents-when simply voted up or down. 31For two quite different reasons, the contours of the Level I1 win-sets are very important for understanding Level I agreements. First, larger win-sets make Level I agreement more likely, ceteris p a r i b u ~ . ~ ~ By definition, any successful agreement must fall within the Level I1 win27. Gerhardt Stoltenberg, Wall Street Journal Europe, 2 October 1986, as cited in C. Randall Henning, Macroeconomic Diplomacy in the 1980s: Domestic Politics and International Conflict Among the United States, Japan, and Europe, Atlantic Paper No. 5 (New York: Croom Helm, for the Atlantic Institute for International Affairs, 1987), p. 1. 28. Ito Takashi, “Conflicts and Coalition in Japan, 1930: Political Groups and the London Naval Disarmament Conference,” in Sven Groennings et al. , eds, The Study of Coalition Behavior (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1970); Kobayashi Tatsuo, “The London Naval Treaty, 1930,” in James W. Morley, ed. , Japan Erupts: The London Naval Conference and the Manchurian Incident, 1928-1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 11-117.I am indebted to William Jarosz for this example. 29. This stipulation is, in fact, characteristic of most real-world ratification procedures, such as House and Senate action on conference committee reports, although it is somewhat violated by the occasional practice of appending “reservations” to the ratification of treaties. 30. New York Times, 26 September 1986. 31. For the conception of win-set, see Kenneth A. Shepsle and Barry R. Weingast, “The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power,” American Political Science Review 81 (March 1987), pp. 5-104. I am indebted to Professor Shepsle for much help on this topic. 32. To avoid tedium, I do not repeat the “other things being equal” proviso in each of the propositions that follow. Under some circumstances an expanded win-set might actually make practicable some outcome that could trigger a dilemma of collective action. See Vincent P. Crawford, “A Theory of Disagreement in Bargaining,” Econometrica 50 (May 1982), pp. 60737. 438 International Organization sets of each of the parties to the accord.Thus, agreement is possible only if those win-sets overlap, and the larger each win-set, the more likely they are to overlap. Conversely, the smaller the win-sets, the greater the risk that the negotiations will break down. For example, during the prolonged prewar Anglo-Argentine negotiations over the Falklands/Malvinas, several tentative agreements were rejected in one capital or the other for domestic political reasons; when it became clear that the initial British and Argentine win-sets did not overlap at all, war became virtually i n e ~ i t a b l e . ~ A brief, but important digression: The possibility of failed ratification suggests that game theoretical analyses should distinguish between voluntary and involuntary defection. Voluntary defection refers to reneging by a rational egoist in the absence of enforceable contracts-the much-analyzed problem posed, for example, in the prisoner’s dilemma and other dilemmas of collective action. Involuntary defection instead reflects the behavior of an agent who is unable to deliver on a promise because of failed ratification.Even though these two types of behavior may be difficult to disentangle in some instances, the underlying logic is quite different. The prospects for international cooperation in an anarchic, “self-help” world are often said to be poor because “unfortunately, policy makers generally have an incentive to cheat. “34 However, as Axelrod, Keohane, and others have pointed out, the temptation to defect can be dramatically reduced among players who expect to meet again. 5 If policymakers in an anarchic world were in fact constantly tempted to cheat, certain features of the 1978 story would be very anomalous. For example, even though the Bonn agreement was negotiated with exquisite care, it contained no provisions for temporal balance, sequencing, or partial conditionality that might have protected the parties from unexpected defection. Moreover, the Germans and the Japanese irretrievably enacted their parts of the bargain more than six months before the president’s action on oil price decontrol and nearly two years before that decision was implemented.Once they had done so, the temptation to the president to renege should have been overpowering, but in fact virtually no one on either side of the decontrol debate within the administration dismissed the Bonn pledge as irrelevant. In short, the Bonn “promise” had political weight, because reneging would have had high political and diplomatic costs. 33. The Sunday Times Insight Team, The Falklands War (London: Sphere, 1982); Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands (New York: Norton, 1984); Alejandro Dabat and Luis Lorenzano, Argentina: The Malvinas and the End of Military Rule (London: Verso, 1984).I am indebted to Louise Richardson for these citations. 34. Matthew E. Canzoneri and Jo Anna Gray, “Two Essays on Monetary Policy in an Interdependent World,” International Finance Discussion Paper 219 (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, February 1983). 35. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 19814); Robert 0. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), esp. p. 116; and the special issue of World Politics, “Cooperation Under Anarchy,” Kenneth A.Oye, ed. , vol. 38 (October 1985). Diplomacy and domestic politics 439 On the other hand, in any two-level game, the credibility of an official commitqent may be low, even if the reputational costs of reneging are high, for the negotiator may be unable to guarantee ratification. The failure of Congress to ratify abolition of the “American Selling Price” as previously agreed during the Kennedy Round trade negotiations is one classic instance; another is the inability of Japanese Prime Minister Sato to deliver on a promise made to President Nixon during the “Textile Wrangle. 36 A key obstacle to Western economic coordination in 1985-87 was the Germans’ fear that the Reagan administration would be politically unable to carry out any commitment it might make to cut the U. S. budget deficit, no matter how well-intentioned the president. Unlike concerns about voluntary defection, concern about “deliver-ability” was a prominent element in the Bonn negotiations. In the post-summit press conference, President Carter stressed that “each of us has been careful not to promise more than he can deliver. A major issue throughout the negotiations was Carter’s own ability to deliver on his energy commitments. The Americans worked hard to convince the others, first, that the president was under severe domestic political constraints on energy issues, which limited what he could promise, but second, that he could deliver what he was prepared to promise. The negotiators in 1978 seemed to follow this presumption about one another: “He will do what he has promised, so long as what he has promised is clear and within his power. Involuntary defection, and the fear of it, can be just as fatal to prospects for cooperation as voluntary defection. Moreover, in some cases, it may be difficult, both for the other side and for outside analysts, to distinguish voluntary and involuntary defection, particularly since a strategic negotiator might seek to misrepresent a voluntary defection as involuntary. Such behavior is itself presumably subject to some reputational constraints, although it is an important empirical question how far reputations generalize from collectivities to negotiators and vice versa.Credibility (and thus the ability to strike deals) at Level I is enhanced by a negotiator’s (demonstrated) ability to “deliver” at Level 11; this was a major strength of Robert Strauss in the Tokyo Round negotiation^. ^’ Involuntary defection can only be understood within the framework of a two-level game. Thus, to return to the issue of win-sets, the smaller the winsets, the greater the risk of involuntary defection, and hence the more applicable the literature about dilemmas of collective action. 38 36. I. M. Destler, Haruhiro Fukui, and Hideo Sato, The Textile Wrangle: Conjlict in JapaneseAmerican Relations, 1969-1971 (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 121-57. 37. Gilbert R. Winham, “Robert Strauss, the MTN, and the Control of Faction,” Journal of World Trade Law 14 (September-October 1980), pp. 377-97, and his International Trade and the Tokyo Round (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 38. This discussion implicitly assumes uncertainty about the contours of the win-sets on the part of the Level I negotiators, for if the win-sets were known with certainty, the negotiators would never propose for ratification an agreement that would be rejected. 40 International Organization The second reason why win-set size is important is that the relative size of the respective Level I1 win-sets will affect the distribution of the joint gains from the international bargain. The larger the perceived win-set of a negotiator, the more he can be “pushed around” by the other Level I negotiators. Conversely, a small domestic win-set can be a bargaining advantage: “I’d like to accept your proposal, but I could never get it accepted at home. Lamenting the domestic constraints under which one must operate is (in the words of one experienced British diplomat) “the natural thing to say at the beginning of a tough negotiation. “39 This general principle was, of course, first noted by Thomas Schelling nearly thirty years ago: The power of a negotiator often rests on a manifest inability to make concessions and meet demands. . . . When the United States Government negotiates with other goverments . . . if the executive branch negotiates under legislative authority, with its position constrained by law, . . . hen the executive branch has a firm position that is visible to its negotiating partners. . . . Of course, strategies such as this run the risk of establishing an immovable position that goes beyond the ability of the other to concede, and thereby provoke the likelihood of stalemate or breakdown. 40 Writing from a strategist’s point of view, Schelling stressed ways in which win-sets may be manipulated, but even when the win-set itself is beyond the negotiator’s control, he may exploit its leverage. A Third World leader whose domestic position is relatively weak (Argentina’s Alfonsin? should be able to drive a better bargain with his international creditors, other things being equal, than one whose domestic standing is more solid (Mexico’s de la Madrid? ). 41The difficulties of winning congressional ratification are often exploited by American negotiators. During the negotiation of the Panama Canal Treaty, for example, “the Secretary of State warned the Panamanians several times . . . that the new treaty would have to be acceptable to at least sixty-seven senators,” and “Carter, in a personal letter to Torrijos, warned that further concessions by the United States would seriously threaten chances for Senate ratifi~ation. ~~ Precisely to forestall such tactics, opponents may demand that a negotiator ensure himself “negotiating room” at Level I1 before opening the Level I negotiations. The “sweet-and-sour” implications of win-set size are summarized in Figure 1, representing a simple zero-sum game between X and Y. XM and 39. Geoffrey W. Harrison, in John C. Campbell, ed. , Successful Negotiation: Trieste 1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 62. 40. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conjict (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 19-28. I 41.I am grateful to Lara Putnam for this example. For supporting evidence, see Robert R. Kaufman, “Democratic and Authoritarian Responses to the Debt Issue: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico,” International Organization 39 (Summer 1985), pp. 473-503. 42. W. Mark Habeeb and I. William Zartman, The Panama Canal Negotiations (Washington, D. C. : Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, 1986), pp. 40, 42. Diplomacy and domestic politics 441 FIGURE 1. Effects of reducing win-set size YM represent the maximum outcomes for X and Y, respectively, while X1 and Y1 represent the minimal outcomes that could be ratified.At this stage any agreement in the range between X1 and Y1 could be ratified by both parties. If the win-set of Y were contracted to, say, YZ(perhaps by requiring a larger majority for ratification), outcomes between Y1 and Y2 would no longer be feasible, and the range of feasible agreements would thus be truncated in Y’s favor. However, if Y, emboldened by this success, were to reduce its win-set still further to Y3 (perhaps by requiring unanimity for ratification), the negotiators would suddenly find themselves deadlocked, for the win-sets no longer overlap atDeterminants of the win-set It is important to understand what circumstances affect win-set size. Three sets of factors are especially important: 43. Several investigators in other fields have recently proposed models of linked games akin to this “two-level” game. Kenneth A. Shepsle and his colleagues have used the notion of “interconnected games” to analyze, for example, the strategy of a legislator simultaneously embedded in two games, one in the legislative arena and the other in the electoral arena.In this model, a given action is simultaneously a move in two different games, and one player maximizes the sum of his payoffs from the two games. See Arthur Denzau, William Riker, and Kenneth Shepsle, “Farquharson and Fenno: Sophisticated Voting and Home Style,” American Political Science Review 79 (December 1985), pp. 1117-34; and Kenneth Shepsle, “Cooperation and Institutional Arrangements,” unpublished manuscript, February 1986. This approach is similar to models recently developed by economists working in the “rational expectations” genre.In these models, a government contends simultaneously against other governments and against domestic trade unions over monetary policy. See, for example, Kenneth Rogoff, “Can International Monetary Policy Cooperation be Counterproductive,” Journal of International Economics 18 (May 1985), pp. 199-217, and Roland Vaubel, “A Public Choice Approach to International Organization,” Public Choice 51 (1986), pp. 39-57. George Tsebelis (“Nested Games: The Cohesion of French Coalitions,” British Journal of Political Science 18 April 19881, pp. 45-70) has developed a theory of “nested games,” in which two alliances play a competitive game to determine total payoffs, while the individual players within each alliance contend over their shares. Fritz Sharpf (“A Game-Theoretical Interpretation of Inflation and Unemployment in Western Europe,” Journal of Public Policy 7 1988, pp. 227-257) interprets macroeconomic policy as the joint outcome of two simultaneous games; in one, the government plays against the unions, while in the other, it responds to the anticipated reactions of the electorate.James E. Alt and Barry Eichengreen (“Parallel and Overlapping Games: Theory and an Application to the European Gas Trade,” unpublished manuscript, November 1987) offer a broader typology of linked games, distinguishing between “parallel” games, in which “the same opponents play against one another at the same time in more than one arena,” and “overlapping” games, which arise “when a particular player is engaged at the same time in games against distinct opponents, and when the strategy pursued in one game limits the strategies available in the other. Detailed comparison of these various linked-game models is a task for the future. 442 International Organization Level I1 preferences and coalitions Level I1 institutions Level I negotiators’ strategies Let us consider each in turn. 1. The size of the win-set depends on the distribution of power, preferences, and possible coalitions among Level I1 constituents. Any testable two-level theory of international negotiation must be rooted in a theory of domestic politics, that is, a theory about the power and preferences of the major actors at Level 11.This is not the occasion for even a cursory evaluation of the relevant alternatives, except to note that the twolevel conceptual framework could in principle be married to such diverse perspectives as Marxism, interest group pluralism, bureaucratic politics, and neo-corporatism. For example, arms negotiations might be interpreted in terms of a bureaucratic politics model of Level I1 politicking, while class analysis or neo-corporatism might be appropriate for analyzing international macroeconomic coordination.Abstracting from the details of Level I1 politics, however, it is possible to sketch certain principles that govern the size of the win-sets. For example, the lower the cost of “no-agreement” to constituents, the smaller the winset. 44Recall that ratification pits the proposed agreement, not against an array of other (possibly attractive) alternatives, but only against “no-agreement. 45 No-agreement often represents the status quo, although in some cases no-agreement may in fact lead to a worsening situation; that might be a reasonable description of the failed ratification of the Versailles Treaty. Some constituents may face low costs from no-agreement, and others high costs, and the former will be more skeptical of Level I agreements than the latter. Members of two-wage-earner families should be readier to strike, for example, than sole breadwinners, and small-town barbers should be more isolationist than international bankers.In this sense, some constituents may offer either generic opposition to, or generic support for, Level I agreements, more or less independently of the specific content of the agreement, although naturally other constituents’ decisions about ratification will be closely conditioned on the specifics. The size of the win-set (and thus the negotiating 44. Thomas Romer and Howard Rosenthal, “Political Resource Allocation, Controlled Agendas, and the Status Quo,” Public Choice 33 (no. 4 , 1978), pp. 7-44. 45. In more formal treatments, the no-agreement outcome is called the “reversion point. ” A given constituent’s evaluation of no-agreement corresponds to what Raiffa terms’ a seller’s “walk-away price,” that is, the price below which he would prefer “no-deal. ” (Raiffa, Art and Science of Negotiation. ) No-agreement is equivalent to what Snyder and Diesing term “breakdown,” or the expected cost of war. (Snyder and Diesing, Conflict Among Nations. ) Diplomacy and domestic politics 443 oom of the Level I negotiator) depends on the relative size of the “isolationist” ,forces (who oppose international cooperation in general) and the “internationalists” (who offer “all-purpose” support). All-purpose support for international agreements is probably greater in smaller, more dependent countries with more open economies, as compared to more self-sufficient countries, like the United States, for most of whose citizens the costs of noagreement are generally lower. Ceteris paribus, more self-sufficient states with smaller win-sets should make fewer international agreements and drive harder bargains in those that they do make.In some cases, evaluation of no-agreement may be the only significant disagreement among the Level I1 constituents, because their interests are relatively homogeneous. For example, if oil imports are to be limited by an agreement among the consuming nations-the sort of accord sought at the Tokyo summit of 1979, for example-then presumably every constituent would prefer to maximize his nation’s share of the available supply, although some constituents may be more reluctant than others to push too hard, for fear of losing the agreement entirely.Similarly, in most wage negotiations, the interests of constituents (either workers or shareholders) are relatively homogeneous, and the most significant cleavage within the Level I1 constituencies is likely to be between “hawks” and “doves,” depending on their willingness to risk a strike. (Walton and McKersie refer to these as “boundary” conflicts, in which the negotiator is caught between his constituency and the external organization. Other international examples in which domestic interests are relatively homogeneous except for the evaluation of no-agreement might include the SALT talks, the Panama Canal Treaty negotiations, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. A negotiator is unlikely to face criticism at home that a proposed agreement reduces the opponents’ arms too much, offers too little compensation for foreign concessions, or contains too few security guarantees for the other side, although in each case opinions may differ on how much to risk a negotiating deadlock in order to achieve these objectives.The distinctive nature of such “homogeneous” issues is thrown into sharp relief by contrasting them to cases in which constituents’ preferences are more heterogeneous, so that any Level I agreement bears unevenly on them. Thus, an internationally coordinated reflation may encounter domestic opposition both from those who think it goes too far (bankers, for example) and from those who think it does not go far enough (unions, for example). In 1919, some Americans opposed the Versailles Treaty because it was too harsh on the defeated powers and others because it was too lenient. 6Such patterns are even more common, as we shall shortly see, where the negotiation involves multiple issues, such as an arms agreement that involves tradeoffs between seaborne and airborne weapons, or a labor agreement that 46. Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (New York: Macmillan, ‘ 1945), pp. 16-37. 444 International Organization involves tradeoffs between take-home pay and pensions. (Walton and McKersie term these “factional” conflicts, because the negotiator is caught between contending factions within his own organization. The problems facing Level I negotiators dealing with a homogeneous (or “boundary”) conflict are quite different from those facing negotiators dealing with a heterogeneous (or “factional”) conflict. In the former case, the more the negotiator can win at Level I-the higher his national oil allocation, the deeper the cuts in Soviet throw-weight, the lower the rent he promises for the Canal, and so one-the better his odds of winning ratification. In such cases, the negotiator may use the implicit threat from his own hawks to maximize his gains (or minimize his losses) at Level I, as Carter and Vance did in dealing with the Panamanians.Glancing over his shoulder at Level 11, the negotiator’s main problem in a homogeneous conflict is to manage the discrepancy between his constituents’ expectations and the negotiable outcome. Neither negotiator is likely to find much sympathy for the enemy’s demands among his own constituents, nor much support for his constituents’ positions in the enemy camp. The effect of domestic division, embodied in hard-line opposition from hawks, is to raise the risk of involuntary defection and thus to impede agreement at Level I.The common belief that domestic politics is inimical to international cooperation no doubt derives from such cases. The task of a negotiator grappling instead with a heterogeneous conflict is more complicated, but potentially more interesting. Seeking to maximize the chances of ratification, he cannot follow a simple “the more, the better” rule of thumb; imposing more severe reparations on the Germans in 1919 would have gained some votes at Level I1 but lost others, as would hastening the decontrol of domestic oil prices in 1978.In some cases, these lines of cleavage within the Level I1 constituencies will cut across the Level I division, and the Level I negotiator may find silent allies at his opponent’s domestic table. German labor unions might welcome foreign pressure on their own government to adopt a more expansive fiscal policy, and Italian bankers might welcome international demands for a more austere Italian monetary policy. Thus transnational alignments may emerge, tacit or explicit, in which domestic interests pressure their respective governments to adopt mutually supportive policies.This is, of course, my interpretation of the 1978 Bonn summit accord. In such cases, domestic divisions may actually improve the prospects for international cooperation. For example, consider two different distributions of constituents’ preferences as between three alternatives: A, B, and noagreement. If 45 percent of the constituents rank these A ; no-agreement ; B, 45 percent rank them B ; no-agreement ; A, and 10 percent rank them B ; A ; no-agreement, then both A and B are in the win-set, even though B would win in a simple Level-11-only game.On the other hand, if 90 percent rank the alternatives A ; no-agreement ; B, while 10 percent still rank them B ; A ; no-agreement, then only A is in the win-set. In this sense, Diplomacy and domestic politics 445 a government that is internally divided is more likely to be able to strike a deal intyrnationally than one that is firmly committed to a single p o l i ~ y . ~ ‘ Conversely, to impose binding ex ante instructions on the negotiators in such a case might exclude some Level I outcomes that would, in fact, be ratifiable in both nations. 8 Thus far we have implicitly assumed that all eligible constituents will participate in the ratification process. In fact, however, participation rates vary across groups and across issues, and this variation often has implications for the size of the win-set. For example, when the costs and/or benefits of a proposed agreement are relatively concentrated, it is reasonable to expect that those constituents whose interests are most affected will exert special influence on the ratification process. 9One reason why Level I1 games are more important for trade negotiations than in monetary matters is that the “abstention rate” is higher on international monetary issues than on trade issues . 50 The composition of the active Level I1 constituency (and hence the character of the win-set) also varies with the politicization of the issue. Politicization often activates groups who are less worried about the costs of noagreement, thus reducing the effective win-set. For example, politicization of the Panama Canal issue seems to have reduced the negotiating flexibility on both sides of the diplomatic table. 1This is one reason why most professional diplomats emphasize the value of secrecy to successful negotiations. However, Woodrow Wilson’s transcontinental tour in 1919 reflected the opposite calculation, namely, that by expanding the active constituency he could ensure ratification of the Versailles Treaty, although in the end this strategy proved fruitless. 52 Another important restriction of our discussion thus far has been the 47. Raiffa notes that “the more diffuse the positions are within each side, the easier it might be to achieve external agreement. (Raiffa, Art and Science of Negotiation, p. 12. ) For the conventional view, by contrast, that domestic unity is generally a precondition for international agreement, see Michael Artis and Sylvia Ostry, International Economic Policy Coordination, Chatham House Papers: 30 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 75-76. 48. “Meaningful consultation with other nations becomes very difficult when the internal process of decision-making already has some of the characteristics of compacts between quasisovereign entities. There is an increasing reluctance to hazard a hard-won domestic consensus in n international forum. ” Henry A. Kissinger, “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy,” in James N. Rosenau, ed. , International Politics and Foreign Policy (New York: Free Press, 1969), p. 266. 49. See James Q. Wilson, Political Organization (New York: Basic Books, 1975) on how the politics of an issue are affected by whether the costs and the benefits are concentrated or diffuse. 50. Another factor fostering abstention is the greater complexity and opacity of monetary issues; as Gilbert R. Winham (“Complexity in International Negotiation,” in Daniel Druckman, ed. Negotiations: A Social-Psychological Perspective Beverly Hills: Sage, 19771, p. 363) observes, “complexity can strengthen the hand of a negotiator vis-A-vis the organization he represents. ” 51. Habeeb and Zartman, Panama Canal Negotiations. 52. Bailey, Wilson and the Great Betrayal. 446 International Organization assumption that the negotiations involve only one issue. Relaxing this assumption has powerful consequences for the play at both levels. 53Various groups at Level I1 are likely to have quite different preferences on the several issues involved in a multi-issue negotiation.As a general rule, the group with the greatest interest in a specific issue is also likely to hold the most extreme position on that issue. In the Law of the Sea negotiations, for example, the Defense Department felt most strongly about sea-lanes, the Department of the Interior about sea-bed mining rights, and so on. 54If each group is allowed to fix the Level I negotiating position for “its” issue, the resulting package is almost sure to be “non-negotiable” (that is, non-ratifiable in opposing capitals). 5 Thus, the chief negotiator is faced with tradeoffs across different issues: how much to yield on mining rights in order to get sea-lane protection, how much to yield on citrus exports to get a better deal on beef, and so on. The implication of these tradeoffs for the respective win-sets can be analyzed in terms of iso-vote or “political indifference” curves. This technique is analogous to conventional indifference curve analysis, except that the operational measure is vote loss, not utility loss. Figure 2 provides an illustrative Edgeworth box analysis. 56The most-preferred outcome for A (the outcome which ins unanimous approval from both the beef industry and the citrus industry) is the upper right-hand corner (Ahl), nd each curve concave to a point AMrepresents the locus of all possible tradeoffs between the interests of ranchers and farmers, such that the net vote in favor of ratification at A’s Level I1 is constant. The bold contour A,-A2 represents the minimal vote necessary for ratification by A, and the wedge-shaped area northeast of A,-A2 represents A’s win-set. Similarly, B,-B2 represents the outcomes that are minimally ratifiable by B, and the l