1. Philip E. Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Ideology and Discontent, edited by David Apter (New York: Free Press, 1964).

2. The logic of what follows draws heavily on Paul Milgrom, Douglass C. North, and Barry R. Weingast, “The Role of Institutions in the Revival of Trade: The Medieval Law Merchant, Private Judges, and the Champagne Fairs,”Economics and Politics 2 (1990): 1-23; and Avner Greif, Paul Milgrom, and Barry R. Weingast, “Coordination, Commitment, and Enforcement: The Case of the Merchant Guild,”Journal of Political Economy 102 (1994): 745-76.

3. Martha Derthick and Paul Quirk, “Why the Regulators Chose to Deregulate,” in Regulatory Policy and the Social Sciences, edited by Roger G. Noll (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

4. Kenneth A. Shepsle, “Comment on Derthick and Quirk,” in Regulatory Policy and the Social Sciences, edited by Roger G. Noll (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

5. Following Goldstein and Keohane's “Introduction” to their edited volume, Judy Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

6. This is not to say that articles promoting the importance of ideas ignore this problem (e.g., the Goldstein and Keohane “Introduction”). Rather, they typically do not refute the “null model” that the ideas do not matter.

7. See, for example, Robert Axelrod and Robert Keohane, “Achieving Cooperation Under Anarchy,”World Politics 38 (1986): 226-54.

8. George W. Downs and David M. Rocke, Tacit Bargaining, Arms Races, and Arms Control (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990); Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Milgrom, North, and Weingast, “Law Merchant”; and Scott Sagan, The Limits of Safety (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

9. For example, Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979).

10. David Kreps, “Corporate Culture,” in Perspectives on Positive Political Economy, edited by Kenneth A. Shepsle and James A. Alt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

11. This logic has been developed in the international context by Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Axelrod and Keohane, “Achieving Cooperation Under Anarchy”; and Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

12. Kreps, “Corporate Culture.”

13. I should note, however, that because of the folk theorem, the omnipresence of equilibria means that some arbitrary distinctions between Ss can make a difference for some equilibria. What is critical, however, is that cooperation does not require such a distinction.

14. Milgrom, North, and Weingast, “Law Merchant”; see also Keohane, After Hegemony, and James Morrow, “Modeling Forms of International Cooperation: Distribution and Information,”International Organization 48 (1994): 387-423.

15. Kreps, “Corporate Culture.”

16. Alan C. Lamborn and Stephen P. Mumme, Statecraft, Domestic Politics, and Foreign Policy Making: The El Chamizal Dispute (Boulder: Westview, 1988).

17. Milgrom, North, and Weingast, “Law Merchant.”

18. See, for example, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, “Terrorism or Peace in the Middle East,”Journal of the Institute of Middle East Studies (Seoul, Korea) (1993) 12:82-92.

19. This does not imply that sovereignty is the sole means of protection, as Morrow's important work demonstrates (Morrow, “Modeling Forms of International Cooperation”).

20. This closely parallels Converse's definition of a belief system “as a configuration of ideas and attitudes in which the elements are bound together by some form of constraint or function interdependence” (Converse, “Belief Systems,” 207).

21. More generally, the community may choose a mechanism for dealing with all future ambiguities, as discussed below in cases such as GATT and the European Court of Justice.

22. It is possible that a set of conventions may characterize some Ss as outside of the category of sovereign states, implying that L's treatment of them may differ from how it treats sovereign Ss. In this case, the problem of cooperation is one between sovereign Ss and L. Although distribution problems among the Ss from different conventions about sovereignty are possible, their analysis is beyond the scope of this article.

23. Stephen Krasner, “Westphalia and All That,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy, edited by Judy Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

24. As Krasner, “Westphalia and All That,” observes, this notion of sovereignty was never absolute, either before or after Westphalia. States have long intervened in the domestic affairs of other states.

25. This description suggests that the ex ante problem of cooperation was not a prisoners' dilemma, but one of a potential winner-take-all game in which it is uncertain which, if any, side will prevail. The Thirty Years' War, in effect ending in a draw, resolved the uncertainty. Ex post, the cooperation dilemma fit more nearly the prisoners' dilemma.

26. Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years' War (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 217.

27. Parker, The Thirty Years' War, 217.

28. See, for example, Kenneth W. Dam, The GATT: Law and the International Economic Organization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

29. For example, Axelrod and Keohane, “Achieving Cooperation Under Anarchy.”

30. Given asymmetric trade flows, bilateral relationships will be unable to sustain cooperation. See the recent results of Giovanni Maggi, “The Role of Multilateral Institutions in International Trade Cooperation,” manuscript, Stanford University (1994).

31. Milgrom, North, and Weingast, “Law Merchant.”

32. This assumes that GATT investigations and judgments are relatively accurate and unbiased. For a model of the mechanism of verification and adjudication described here, see Milgrom, North, and Weingast, “Law Merchant.”

33. The material in this subsection draws on Geoffrey Garrett and Barry R. Weingast, “Ideas, Interests, and Institutions: Constructing the European Community's Common Market,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy, edited by Judy Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Singling out this particular cooperation dilemma does not imply that it is the most important dilemma of European integration.

34. See Martin Shapiro, “The European Court of Justice,” unpublished manuscript, University of California School of Law (1990).

35. Shapiro, “The European Court of Justice.”

36. This form of ambiguity arises because it is costly to verify competing claims to a dispute, not necessarily because an unforeseen contingency has arisen.

37. Garrett and Weingast, “Ideas, Interests, and Institutions.”

38. A separate issue, beyond the scope of this discussion, concerns the incentives for the European Court of Justice to behave in the manner just described. See Garrett and Weingast, “Ideas, Interests, and Institutions,” for a discussion of this issue.

39. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman, War and Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Downs and Rocke, Tacit Bargaining, Arms Races, and Arms Control; James Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,”American Political Science Review 88(1994):577-92; Morrow, “Modeling Forms of International Cooperation”; and Robert Powell, Nuclear Deterrence Theory: The Search for Credibility (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

40. This theme is elaborated at length in Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pt. 3.

41. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

42. This article thus has much in common with John Ferejohn, “Rationality and Intention: Elections in 17th Century England,” in The Economic Approach to Politics, edited by Kristen Monroe (New York: Harper & Row, 1992); and with Robert H. Bates and Barry R. Weingast, “Rationality and Interpreation: The Politics of Transition,” working paper, Hoover Institution, Stanford University (1995); and Garrett and Weingast, “Ideas, Interests, and Institutions.”

A Rational Choice Perspective on the Role of Ideas: Shared Belief Systems and State Sovereignty in International Cooperation

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