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The Politics of Linkage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Arthur A. Stein
Arthur A. Stein
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

Linkage politics—a state's making its course of action concerning a given issue contingent upon another state's behavior in a different issue area—is of interest to policymakers as well as to those theoreticians who employ an issue—area approach to the study of international politics. However, there has been little discussion of the circumstances and conditions of linkage, or of its bargaining strategies. In this paper, 2 × 2 games are used as a model of strategic interaction to delineate the situations amenable to linkage, the forms of linkage, and relevant strategies. Coerced, threat-induced, and mutual linkage are illustrated and distinguished.

Type
Research Note
Information
World Politics , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , October 1980 , pp. 62 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1980

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References

1 For an analysis of influence from the perspective of global social choice, see Young, Oran R., “Anarchy and Social Choice: Reflections on the International Polity,” World Politics, XXX (January 1978), 241–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Nichols, Jeannette P., “Dollar Strength as a Liability in United States Diplomacy,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. III (February 1967), 47.Google Scholar

3 This paper is not, however, a classic game-theoretic one. See the distinctions provided by Young, Oran R., “Manipulative Models of Bargaining: Introduction,” in Young, , ed., Bargaining: Formal Theories of Negotiation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 303–18.Google Scholar A recent study that finds 2 × 2 games the most appropriate model of strategic interaction is Snyder, Glenn H. and Diesing, Paul, Conflict Among Nations: Bargaining, Decision Making, and System Structure in International Crises (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

4 Rapoport, Anatol and Guyer, Melvin J., in their article “A Taxonomy of 2 × 2 Games,” General Systems, XI (1966), 203–14Google Scholar, enumerate the complete set of unique 2 × 2 games. The situation numbers below the 2 × 2 tables in the present article refer to the listing they provide.

3 The situations characterized as potential coerced linkage situations differ from those games delineated in Rapoport and Guyer, ibid., as having force-vulnerable equilibria.

6 This is one possible interpretation of the big influence of small allies. See Keohane, Robert O., “The Big Influence of Small Allies,” Foreign Policy, No. 2 (Spring 1971), 161–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 The term “blackmail” was first used for such a context by Daniel Ellsberg in 1959, but he did not not specify the defining characteristics of such situations. See Ellsberg, “The Theory and Practice of Blackmail,” reprinted in Young (fn. 3), 343–63. The situations described here as amenable to threat-induced linkage differ from Kenneth Oye's characterization of blackmail in “The Domain of Choice: International Constraints and Carter Administration Foreign Policy,” in Oye, Kenneth A., Rothchild, Donald, and Lieber, Robert J., eds., Eagle Entangled: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Complex World (New York: Longman, 1979), 13–17.Google Scholar The situations described here also differ from those games listed by Rapoport and Guyer (fn. 4) as having threat-vulnerable equilibria.

8 In this situation, the threatened action is not reversible. Once they have been killed, hostages cannot be brought back to life. In other circumstances, the threatened action may be reversible; that, too, affects the credibility of the threat.

9 A Pareto-deficient outcome is one that all actors find inferior to a particular alternative outcome. The definition of mutual linkage differs both in defining-criteria and relevant strategies from the characterization of a backscratch situation by Oye (fn. 7).

10 Hardin, Russell, “Collective Action as an Agreeable n-Prisoners' Dilemma,” Behavioral Science, XVI (September 1971), 472–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar There is a large body of literature that argues that alliance relationships exemplify the dilemma of collective goods, a literature spawned by Olson, Mancur Jr, and Zeckhauser, Richard, “An Economic Theory of Alliances,” Review of Economics and Statistics, XLVIII (August 1966), 266–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar It is argued above that in the case of the United States and its allies, the situation is really one of potential threat-induced linkage (situation 39). The difference is whether the allies are equal in power or not.

11 Elsewhere, I suggest that these situations are one of the two prototypical contexts for regime formation, as actors have an incentive to collaborate and eschew independent decision making. See Stein, , “Global Anarchy, State Interests, and International Regimes” (paper delivered at the 1980 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August 29, 1980).Google Scholar

12 Situations in which there is no equilibrium outcome or in which there are two equilibria are not discussed here because in these cases both actors already have contingent strategies.

13 If actor A, for example, were independent, it might prefer A1 or A2 but would be indifferent both between A1B1 and A1B2 and between A1B2 and A1B2.

14 The term “compllence” was coined by Schelling, Thomas C.. See his The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960)Google Scholar and Arms and Influence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966). The terminology of others differs; see George, Alexander L., Hall, David K., and Simons, William E., The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy: Laos, Cuba, Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).Google Scholar

15 These situations are thus ripe for misperception. See Stein, , “On Misperception,” UCLA Center for International and Strategic Affairs, ACIS Wording Paper No. 23 (1980).Google Scholar

16 Dale Dean, P. Jr, and Vasquez, John A., “From Power Politics to Issue Politics: Bipolarity and Multipolarity in Light of a New Paradigm,” Western Political Quarterly, XXIX (March 1976), 7–28Google Scholar; Lampert, Donald E., Falkowski, Lawrence S., and Mansbach, Richard W., “Is there an International System?” International Studies Quarterly, XXII (March 1978), 143–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The “bureaucratic politics” approach implicitly presents an argument for issue disaggregation in the study of international politics.

17 Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).Google Scholar

18 This is the basis for one of the central critiques of the “bureaucratic politics” approach; see Krasner, Stephen D., “Are Bureaucracies Important? (or Allison Wonderland),” Foreign Policy, No. 7 (Summer 1972), 159–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ball, Desmond J., “The Blind Men and the Elephant: A Critique of Bureaucratic Politics Theory,” Australian Outlook., XXVIII (April 1974), 71–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perlmutter, Amos, “The Presidential Political Center and Foreign Policy: A Critique of the Revisionist and Bureaucratic-Political Orientations,” World Politics, XXVII (October 1974), 87–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar