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.

In this article I draw on the two-level game approach to analyze the influence of domestic politics on US-China trade disputes in alternative energy, especially in solar energy. I suggest that the difficulty Washington faces in getting China to address market access barriers in alternative energy needs to be viewed in light of both the coalitional dynamics in the United States resulting from the specific bilateral trade and investment relationship in this sector and Beijing's willingness to use industrial policy to foster economic competitiveness in nascent industries. Specifically, as China occupies the middle of the supply chain in the solar industry, both downstream users of low-cost Chinese imports and exporters of upstream products to China have voiced strong concerns about US trade action. Such domestic opposition, coupled with the importance of industrial policy for defending the country's long-term interests in a “strategic emerging” sector such as alternative energy, substantially constrains Washington's ability to influence Chinese policies.

This paper develops the normative logic of two-level games linking international negotiation and domestic acceptability. The kernel of the logic is to be found in the claim that normatively governed relations involve agents simultaneously asking whether the expectations that they have under an agreement are reasonable given the expectations of others under that agreement. This normative logic mirrors the empirical logic that Putnam (1988) identified in his seminal account.

The normative logic is derived from a consideration of relevant concepts of representation, and in particular the concepts of authorization in international negotiation and accountability in domestic ratification. Rawls’ (1996) distinction between the reasonable and the rational is then deployed to state normative conditions of domestic acceptability as well as the obligations of fairness that states owe to one another. Two implications for democratic theory are drawn.