Negotiating under political uncertainty: national elections and the dynamics of international cooperation

This article explores if (and how) national elections affect the chances of concluding an international agreement. Drawing on a literature about the informational efficiency of elections, it examines how political uncertainty in the run-up to an election impacts the dynamics of international negotiations. Using the case of decision making in the European Union (EU), it finds that (1) pending national elections significantly reduce the chances of reaching an agreement at the international level (2) this effect is strongest during close elections with uncertain outcomes and (3) the effect is particularly pronounced in the case of elections in larger member states. The findings highlight the fruitfulness of further research on the dynamics between national and international politics. The article has positive and normative implications for the literature on two-level games, international negotiations and legislative bargaining in the EU

May’s decision to trigger Article 50 by March 2017 is unwise

The announced timing with respect to Article 50 will likely deprive Theresa May’s government of the valuable negotiation time and substantially diminish her bargaining power with the EU27. Mareike Kleine and Clement Minaudier make this argument on the basis of their research which shows that international negotiations falter when there are pending elections on the national level

Essays in information economics

These essays examine how economic agents strategically choose to produce, manipulate, or disclose information, when that information can influence the behaviour of others. By theoretically modelling these choices, it seeks to contribute to debates about the optimal design of policies such as transparency rules, the regulation of lobbying, or the concentration of ownership among information providers such as media groups. The models developed in these essays also provide a framework to interpret and evaluate empirical assessments of how information influences behaviour. The first chapter looks at how interest groups choose to generate information to influence policies. It innovates on the literature by explicitly modelling the choice of policy makers to obtain their own confidential internal information ahead of interactions with these groups. This approach reveals unintended consequences of transparency policies and the subtle role that institutions such as congressional research agencies can have on the quality of policy making. The second chapter studies how agents choose to produce new information, for instance by running experiments, in the presence of competing information providers. In particular, it examines whether these agents produce more information when they compete than when they collude. The existing literature has established that when these agents possess no existing information, competition always increases the amount of new information produced. I show that when agents do possess prior information, this conclusion does not necessarily hold. The third chapter analyses how policy choices are affected when voters have a limited capacity to correctly interpret information about policy performance. In a situation where policy performance provides information about the competence of policy makers, and where voters decide whether to re-elect incumbents based on that information, voters may benefit from these cognitive limitations as they can induce policy makers to choose better policies

Replication Data for: Negotiating under political uncertainty: national elections and the dynamics of international cooperation

This article explores if and how national elections affect the chances of concluding an international agreement. Drawing on a literature on the informational efficiency of elections, we are interested in how political uncertainty in the run up to an election impacts the dynamics of international negotiations. Using the case of decision-making in the European Union (EU), we find that pending national elections significantly reduce the chances of reaching an agreement at the international level, that this effect is strongest during close elections with uncertain outcomes, and that it is particularly pronounced in the case of elections in larger member states. Our findings highlight the fruitfulness of further research into the dynamics between national and international politics. The article has positive and normative implications for the literature on two-level games, international negotiations, and legislative bargaining in the EU