Building Multilateralism

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9601080 Downs Despite the prominent role that they play in the evolution of many multilaterals and their obviously strategic character, membership decisions have received little theoretical attention from political scientists. Individual political scientists often have informed opinions about the historical consequences of a multilateral's decision to incorporate or exclude a particular state or the relative merits of a specific expansion decision that a multilateral now faces, but only recently have members of the discipline attempted to generalize about the factors that determine the outcome of these decisions or how they are likely to affect the multilateral's future evolution. As a result, international relations theory has not played a prominent role in the current and extremely salient debates about the likelihood and consequences of expanding membership; in NATO and the EU to include different Eastern Europe states or expanding the membership of NAFTA to include various Latin American states. In this project the investigators continue recent efforts to formulate a formal theory of multilateralism that is capable of addressing such membership issues. To accomplish this, they develop a set of models that endogenize three interrelated decisions that cannot be understood in isolation. These involve 1) membership, 2) voting rules, and 3) depth of cooperation. The researchers explore how these decisions are affected by variations in three factors that are often salient in descriptions of multilateral development: 1) the nature of the good that the multilateral regulates, 2) the preferences of states both within and outside the multilateral and uncertainty about those preferences, and 3) uncertainty about the capacity of candidate states. Conclusions are evaluated in the context of case studies that examine the evolution of five multilateral agreements: the European Union, the Andean Common Market, Montreal Protocol, GATT/WTO, the Med Plan, and the International Whaling Commission. ***