Building Multilateralism

9601080唐斯 尽管它们在许多多边机构的发展中发挥着重要作用，而且具有明显的战略性，但成员资格的决定很少受到政治学家的理论关注。 个别政治科学家经常对多边决定纳入或排除特定国家的历史后果或多边现在面临的特定扩张决定的相对优点有知情的意见，但直到最近，该学科的成员才试图概括决定这些决定的结果的因素或它们可能如何影响多边的未来演变。 因此，国际关系理论在当前关于扩大成员国的可能性和后果的极其突出的辩论中没有发挥突出的作用;在北约和欧盟包括不同的东欧国家或扩大北美自由贸易协定的成员国以包括各种拉丁美洲国家。 在这个项目中，研究人员继续最近的努力，制定一个正式的多边主义理论，能够解决这些成员问题。 为了实现这一目标，他们开发了一套模型，将三个相互关联的决定内生化，这些决定不能孤立地理解。 这些问题包括：1）成员资格; 2）投票规则; 3）合作深度。 研究人员探讨了这些决定如何受到三个因素变化的影响，这些因素在多边发展的描述中往往是突出的：1）多边监管的商品的性质，2）多边内部和外部国家的偏好以及这些偏好的不确定性，以及3）候选国家能力的不确定性。 在案例研究的背景下，研究五个多边协定的演变：欧洲联盟，安第斯共同市场，蒙特利尔议定书，关贸总协定/世贸组织，地中海计划，和国际捕鲸委员会的结论进行评估。 ***

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. ***