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Published August 15, 2017 | Submitted
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Linkage Politics

Abstract

I extend the basic repeated Prisoners' Dilemma to allow for the linkage of punishment strategies across issues (issue linkage) as well as decentralized third-party enforcement (player linkage). I then synthesize the concepts of issue and player linkage to develop the notion of domestic-international linkage, which allows for the linkage of trigger strategy punishments across games played over different issues by different sets of players. In a two-level game, domestic and international cooperation may be reinforced by a punishment linkage: a defection in the domestic game may trigger a breakdown of international cooperation, and vice versa. I also examine the conditions under which the incentives to cooperate are stronger at the domestic level than at the international level, and vice versa. In this case domestic-international linkage allows for the credibility surplus to spill over to the level with the credibility deficit. Finally, I provide conditions under which governments are better off delinking domestic and international issues.

Additional Information

Revised version. Original dated to May 1994. Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the 1994 and 1995 conferences on ''New Games: Modelling International Relations after the Cold War" at the University of California, San Diego, the 1995 meetings of the Public Choice Society, and the 1996 meetings of the International Studies Association. James Fearon, Jeffry Frieden, David Lake, Lisa Martin, James Morrow, Paul Papayoanou, Duncan Snidal, and Arthur Stein provided insightful comments. I am deeply indebted to Robert Pahre and an anonymous referee for their detailed critique of an earlier draft. Published as Lohmann, S. (1997). Linkage politics. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 41(1), 38-67.

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August 19, 2023
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January 14, 2024