"Domestic politics matters" has become a rallying cry for international relations scholars over the past decade, yet the question still remains: Just how does it matter? In this book, George Downs and David Rocke argue that an important part of the international impact of domestic politics springs from the institutional responses to its many uncertainties. This impact is due not so much to the errors in judgment these uncertainties can cause as to the strategic and institutional consequences of knowing that such errors are possible. The heart of the book is its formal analysis of how three kinds of domestic uncertainty have shaped international relations through their influence on three very different institutions. One chapter deals with the decision rules that citizens create to cope with uncertainty about the quality of their representation, and how these can lead to the paradoxical "gambling for resurrection" effect. Another chapter describes the extent to which the weak enforcement provisions of GATT can be understood as a mechanism to cope with uncertain but intermittent interest group demands for protection. The third chapter looks at the impact of uncertainty on the creation, survival, and membership of multilateral regulatory institutions, such as the Montreal Protocol and EU, when some states question the capacity of other states to meet their treaty obligations.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures ix List of Tables xi Preface xiii 1 The Impact of Uncertainty 3 1.1 Introduction 3 1.2 Realism and Early Rational Choice 9 1.3 The Psychological Tradition 13 1.4 The Institutionalist Tradition 19 1.5 Recent Research 23 1.6 Conclusion 25 2 Game Theory and Uncertainty 27 2.1 Modeling Uncertainty 27 2.2 Games of Incomplete Information 28 2.2.1 Introduction 28 2.2.2 Bayesian Updating 31 2.2.3 Signaling and Reputation 35 2.3 Principal-Agent Models 41 2.4 Trigger Strategies 44 2.5 Conclusion 54 3 Gambling for Resurrection 56 3.1 Introduction 56 3.2 The Theory 59 3.3 The Executive's Dilemma 67 3.4 Gambling for Resurrection 68 3.5 Conclusion 71 3.6 Appendix: Optimal Bayesian Policies 72 4 Optimal Imperfection: GATT and the Uncertainty of Interest Group Demands 76 4.1 Introduction 76 4.2 Modeling Trade Treaties 77 4.3 Treaty Maintenance under Perfect Information 79 4.3.1 Reversionary Strategies 79 4.3.2 Reciprocity and Tit-for-Tat 85 4.4 Interest Group Uncertainty 87 4.5 Asymmetric Preferences 91 4.6 Coping with Nontariff Barriers: U.S. Section 301 93 4.7 Conclusion 99 4.8 Appendixes 101 4.8.1 Assumptions 101 4.8.2 Proof of Proposition 4.1 101 4.8.3 Proof of Proposition 4.2 102 4.8.4 Proof of Proposition 4.3 104 5 Willing but Maybe Not Able: The Impact of Uncertainty about State Capacity 105 5.1 Introduction 105 5.2 An Environmental Model 107 5.2.1 Enforcement Ill 5.2.2 Trigger Strategy 112 5.3 Capacity Uncertainty and Change 114 5.3.1 Capacity Uncertainty 114 5.3.2 Capacity Change 117 5.3.3 Equilibrium Behavior 119 5.4 The Effects of State Capacity Uncertainty 121 5.5 Informational Issue-Linking and a Multivariate Model 123 5.6 Conclusion 125 5.7 Appendixes 127 5.7.1 Normal Mixture Distributions 12 5.7.2 Proof of Proposition 5.1 127 6 Conclusion 130 6.1 Domestic Uncertainty and Institutions 130 6.2 Policy Prescriptions 138 Bibliography 143 Index 155