Modelling the role of domestic politics in international environmental negotiations

Abstract

The thesis considers formal abstractions for reasoning about the role of domestic politics in international environmental negotiations, by discussing three formal developments of the theory of two-level games. Formal abstractions for reasoning about the role of information, domestic political competition, and how the incentive to cooperate varies with institutional setup, are discussed using U.S. climate policy as the empirical reference point. U.S. rejection of Kyoto is analysed first as a case of involuntary defection and then in terms of the influence of the U.S. coal industry. The main conclusions are: 1) although formal developments of the theory of two-level games provide examples of plausible mechanisms for describing the role of domestic politics, the specific applications to U.S. climate policy are less than satisfying; and 2) relaxing the assumption of zero payoff for failure to ratify would increase the expressive power of formal two-level models.