Building Multilateralism

9601080个唐宁街--尽管它们在许多多边体系的发展过程中发挥着突出的作用，而且它们具有明显的战略性质，但政治学家在理论上对入盟决定几乎没有给予多少关注。个别政治学家经常对多边决定纳入或排除某一特定国家的历史后果，或多边目前面临的具体扩大决定的相对优劣提出明智的意见，但直到最近，该学科的成员才试图概括出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的可能性和后果的辩论中没有发挥突出的作用；在北约和欧盟中，包括不同的东欧国家，或者将北美自由贸易协定的成员扩大到包括多个拉丁美洲国家。在这一项目中，调查人员最近继续努力制定能够处理此类成员问题的正式多边主义理论。为了实现这一点，他们开发了一套模型，将不能孤立理解的三个相互关联的决定内在化。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，这三个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和这些偏好的不确定性，以及3)候选国能力的不确定性。在案例研究的背景下对结论进行了评估，这些案例研究审查了五项多边协定的演变：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。***

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. ***