Theoretical Politics

The recent debates about the nature of social freedom, understood in a broadly negative way, have generated three main views of the topic: these represent freedom respectively as non-limitation, non-interference and non-domination. The participants in these debates often go different ways, however, because they address different topics under common names, not because they hold different intuitions on common topics. Social freedom is sometimes understood as option-freedom, sometimes as agency-freedom and the different directions taken by the theories can often be explained by their addressing freedom in one sense, then in another. The non-limitation approach focuses primarily on option-freedom, the non-domination approach on agencyfreedom, whereas the representation of freedom as non-interference seems to spring from a failure to resolve the focus decisively on one target or another.

We model the cultural outcomes of ‘sons of the soil’ conflicts. These are conflicts between the local inhabitants of a particular region and migrants to the region, typically belonging to a dominant national culture. Our goal is to understand the conditions under which migrants assimilate into the local culture, or in which locals assimilate into the national culture. The model has two main actors: a national elite of a dominant ethnic group, and a regional elite seeking to promote the traditional culture of the sons of the soil. Both actors have parallel strategies, viz. assimilating the other group into their culture, controlling the size of the migrant population, doing both, or allowing market forces to determine outcomes. The model has three possible cultural outcomes: the culture tips to that of the sons of the soil; the culture tips to that of the migrant group; or the region remains bicultural, with each group retaining its own culture. We illustrate these outcomes through f...

This paper develops a formal model to explain the repeated failure of Russian opposition movements to generate mass mobilisation or threaten regime stability. Drawing on global games, Bayesian signalling theory and selective-repression models, we show that three mechanisms interact to prevent collective action: coordination uncertainty, repression-induced risk inflation, and the inability of citizens to infer the regime's true strength or the resolve of others. The analysis integrates mathematical derivations with behavioural and sociological insights, including preference falsification, conformity pressures and repression-generated pessimism. We demonstrate that even widespread dissatisfaction cannot produce a protest cascade when citizens cannot observe each other's intentions and when the state strategically injects noise into the informational environment. The model explains why Russian protests spark but never spread, why opposition leaders fail to generate critical mass and why the Kremlin's targeted repression strategy is highly effective. The results have implications for the comparative study of authoritarian resilience and the structural limits facing opposition movements in Russia.

This paper provides simple closed form formulae for players' expected payoffs in a broad class of all-pay contests where players may have constraints on their actions. We thank participants at the 2011 Tournaments, Contests and Relative Performance Evaluation conference for helpful suggestions. This paper was completed while we were visiting the Economics Department of the University of British Columbia.

The formation of an alliance in conflict situations is known to suffer from a collective action problem and from the potential of internal conflict. We show that budget constraints of an intermediate size can overcome this strong disadvantage and explain the formation of alliances.

Tools dedicated to inferring the ideological leanings of legislators from observed votes-techniques such as NOMINATE or the itemresponse-theory model of Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers ( )-rest on the assumption that the political process that generates abstentions is ignorable, an assumption not always easy to justify. We extended the item-response-theory model to analyze abstention and voting processes simultaneously in situations where abstentions are suspected to be nonrandom. We applied this expanded model to two assemblies where the existing literature gives reason to expect nonrandom abstentions, and we demonstrate how our extensions yield nuanced analyses of legislative politics. We also acknowledge limits to our ability to decide on the adequacy of alternative assumptions about abstentions, since these assumptions are not readily verifiable. Politicians make collective decisions in committees and legislatures by voting on a series of bills or proposals, usually by selecting from binary choices. Political scientists use the observed pattern of ayes and nays to infer the ideological leanings of politicians, either through nonparametric optimal-classification schemes (Poole 2005), likelihood-based inference methods , or Bayesian Monte Carlo Markov Chain itemresponse-theory models . These "ideal points" then become primitive quantities that aid our efforts to understand sundry issues regarding representation of constituencies, congressional institutions, or relations with other branches of power, to name but a few. In many instances, however, legislators fail to express straightforward preferences through aye or nay votes and instead avoid responding, actively enter an "abstention vote," or make themselves physically absent from the floor as votes are registered. When this deviation occurs, assumptions about the process that generates abstentions, absences, and nonresponses become relevant in our assessments of inferences about the ideological leanings of politicians.

In this paper, we study the strategy-proofness properties of the randomized Condorcet voting system (RCVS). Discovered at several occasions independently, the RCVS is arguably the natural extension of the Condorcet method to cases where a deterministic Condorcet winner does not exists. Indeed, it selects the always-existing and essentially unique Condorcet winner of lotteries over alternatives. Our main result is that, in a certain class of voting systems based on pairwise comparisons of alternatives, the RCVS is the only one to be Condorcet-proof. By Condorcet-proof, we mean that, when a Condorcet winner exists, it must be selected and no voter has incentives to misreport his preferences. We also prove two theorems about group-strategy-proofness. On one hand, we prove that there is no group-strategyproof voting system that always selects existing Condorcet winners. On the other hand, we prove that, when preferences have a one-dimensional structure, the RCVS is group-strategy-proof.

In this paper, we study the strategy-proofness properties of the randomized Condorcet voting system (RCVS). Discovered at several occasions independently, the RCVS is arguably the natural extension of the Condorcet method to cases where a deterministic Condorcet winner does not exists. Indeed, it selects the always-existing and essentially unique Condorcet winner of lotteries over alternatives. Our main result is that, in a certain class of voting systems based on pairwise comparisons of alternatives, the RCVS is the only one to be Condorcet-proof. By Condorcet-proof, we mean that, when a Condorcet winner exists, it must be selected and no voter has incentives to misreport his preferences. We also prove two theorems about group-strategyproofness. On one hand, we prove that there is no group-strategy-proof voting system that always selects existing Condorcet winners. On the other hand, we prove that, when preferences have a one-dimensional structure, the RCVS is group-strategy-proof.

This study contrasts the rationalist and psychologist approaches to information failure as the cause of crisis escalation and war. Building on the psychological insights on misperception, it presents a simple game-theoretic model of crisis bargaining, where signals are subject to perceptual errors and thereby multiple interpretations. The model allows us to analyze the interplay between the problem of misrepresentation in sending signals and the problem of misperception in forming beliefs. The analysis offers a rationalist logic of signaling and perception, which links Bayesian learning, incentive problems, misperception, and war. The analysis also shows that misperception generates more than pathologies in crises—misperception, under the right condition, makes signals fully informative, reduces the risk of war, and attenuates the adverse impact of incomplete information on the risk of crisis escalation and war.

The purpose of this study is to redefine populism, which exists in many countries that make up the international community and is understood as a political phenomenon, and to analyze the possible similarities between Prime Minister Viktor Mihaly Orban of Hungary (2010-present) and current President Donald John Trump of the United States. In this context, the study identifies two areas of focus: the theoretical approaches to populism and the effects of populism on the representative democracy of a nation-state. Considering the theoretical approaches and interpretive analyses of populism, it can be concluded that both Viktor Orban and Donald J. Trump can be regarded as populist leaders from political-strategic and ideal-discursive perspectives. The theoretical approaches to populism described in this article allow for the construction of a theoretical framework aimed at understanding the populist phenomenon and the dynamics of contemporary populist leaders.

Political scientist Professor Bruce Bueno De Mesquita, has made significant claims for the predictive accuracy of his computational model of group decision making, receiving much popular press, including newspaper articles, books and a television documentary entitled ‘The New Nostradamus’. Despite these and many journal and conference publications related to the topic, no clear elucidation of the model exists in the open literature or can be found in a single place. We expose and present the model by careful navigation of the literature and illustrate the soundness of our interpretation by replicating De Mesquita’s own results. We also raise issues regarding sensitivity and convergence.

popularized the argument that crises are more likely to end in war when two nations disagree about their relative bargaining power. This is known as the mutual optimism cause of war. Fey and Ramsay (2007) argue that existing models of crisis bargaining cannot properly evaluate this explanation. They propose an alternative class of models with features they claim are better suited for the purpose, and prove that war cannot occur with positive probability in equilibrium in any model of this class. They conclude that the mutual optimism explanation is logically incoherent. We provide a modern rationalist specification of the mutual optimism explanation using our standard models and defend them against the five allegations Fey and Ramsay make against them. We further show that their result has little to do with optimism but instead depends on two indefensible assumptions: (1) actors can unilaterally avoid war by imposing peace terms on opponents who find them worse than war, and (2) the terms of any peace outcome cannot depend on crisis behavior. Their class of models cannot be used to study crisis bargaining in general and mutual optimism in particular. We have benefitted from illuminating discussions with Bob Powell, Kris Ramsay, and Mark Fey. We thank Christina Schneider and Megumi Naoi for helpful comments on previous drafts.

As I stand here today, I am suddenly keenly aware that I am a theorist in the clutches of a bunch of empiricists. Perhaps that should not matter. After all, most of us here would agree that the ideal dissertation consists of a theory (perhaps formalized, perhaps not), hypotheses derived from that theory, and an empirical assessment, preferably multidimensional (large-N statistical analyses, case studies, process-tracing, experiments), of these hypotheses. Me might also agree that the theory should be internally consistent: its assumptions do not contradict each other and its conclusions follow from its premises. Some might even agree that formal modeling could be helpful in ensuring that last part. So one big happy family, right? Well, obviously not quite right or else I would not be here talking about that. As a practicing theorist who uses applied formal game-theoretic models – and these, by the way, are the ones I will be exclusively talking about today – I cannot help but notice...

Theories of lawmaking generate equilibrium predictions about the set of acceptable policy outcomes. Tests of theoretical predictions often use independently estimated ideal points based on roll call votes to estimate what appear to be theoretically relevant quantities. This paper demonstrates that such measures are invalid because of the endogeneity of the roll call record; predictions regarding equilibrium outcomes necessarily yield predictions about the agenda used to enact the outcomes. I demonstrate how divorcing the statistical ...

This paper proposes four concepts of exploitation that encapsulate common uses of the word in social interactions: unfair advantage, unequal exchange, using persons as means, and free-riding. It briefly discusses how these concepts appear in the literature (the first two are prominent in Roemer’s classical work), and then examines how these forms of exploitation are related and how they can occur.

While a number of studies have examined the politics of tariff decision-making in the United States, little work has examined the subsequent political effects of tariff policy. We help fill this gap in the literature by analyzing—both theoretically and empirically—the electoral implications of tariff revision. Specifically, we investigate the veracity of the Cannon Thesis—the proposition advanced by Speaker Joe Cannon in 1910 that the majority party in the U.S. House was punished when it made major revisions to the tariff. We find that from 1877 to 1934 major tariff revisions were, on average, associated with a significant loss of votes for majority-party members—both regionally and nationally—that translated into a loss of House seats. We find support for the notion that major tariff revisions generated inordinate uncertainty among various business interests, which the opposition party could then use (by leveraging fear and market instability) to mobilize its base and gain ground i...

Our model describes competition between groups driven by the choices of self-interested voters within groups. Within a Poisson voting environment, parties observe aggregate support from groups and can allocate prizes or punishments to them. In a tournament style analysis, the model characterizes how contingent allocation of prizes based on relative levels of support affects equilibrium voting behavior. In addition to standard notions of pivotality, voters influence the distribution of prizes across groups. Such prize pivotality supports positive voter turnout even in non-competitive electoral settings. The analysis shows that competition for a prize awarded to the most supportive group is only stable when two groups actively support a party. However, competition among groups to avoid punishment is stable in environments with any number of groups. We conclude by examining implications for endogenous group formation and how politicians structure the allocation of rewards and punishments.

Do governments in less-democratic newly industrialized countries (NICs) bargain with their citizens? In this article we develop a game-theoretic model to show that the government may not be able to avoid bargaining in open economies such as the Asian NICs when economic conditions are less than optimal. The reason is that, in the absence of government bargaining, citizens acting rationally and strategically choose to withdraw resources such as labor or production investment from a weak economy. Under these circumstances, government bargaining to elicit resource investment is a sub-game perfect equilibrium outcome. To test the model, we analyze data on production investment in the Asian NICs of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia from the 1960s to the 1990s. The analysis supports the prediction of the formal model and, hence, makes three contributions to the study of this topic. First, when we relax the assumption that citizens are naı¨ve, governments in less-democratic open economies such as the Asian NICs may not be able to avoid bargaining with their citizens. Second, resource-withholding or withdrawal is an equilibrium strategy that convinces the government to bargain. Third, governments may bargain credibly even in the absence of formal constraints. KEY WORDS. credibility. government-bargaining. less-democratic countries. resource withdrawal. self-enforced equilibrium

Why is there more public corruption in some places than others? Cross-national and American state politics research assume that electoral pressures (e.g. greater inter-party competition, turnout) mitigate corruption. Some claim that increased electoral competition should reduce corruption substantially. We propose these assumptions and claims do not fit with public corruption in advanced democracies. We expand on extant studies with recent data on corruption measured at a more refined geographical level. We find that the nearly all variation in corruption can be explained by 1) higher density of social interactions, 2) the presence of unelected public officials, and 3) the presence of people (immigrants) who might be victimized by unelected public officials. Electoral competition at the level of the mass electorate may have a weak association with lower corruption, but existing theory fails to account for how electoral pressures affect unelected officials operating independently of elected officials.

Ecxplanations and predictions of people's choices, in everyday life as well as in the social sciences, are often founded on the assumption of human rationality. The definition of rationality has been much debated, but there is general agreement that rational choices should satisfy some elementary requirements of consistency and coherence. In this article

Four pure types of legislative organization are characterized as data generating processes for commonly used measures of preferences or, in the spatial vernacular, ideal points. The types of legislative organization are differentiated by their partisan versus nonpartisan nature of agenda formation, and by whether the amendment process is open or closed. For each organization, roll call voting data are Monte-Carlo generated and used as input for four different ideal point measures: standard percent-correct interest group ratings (IGRs), linear factor analysis scores (LFAs), W-NOMINATE ratings (NOMs), and Markov chain Monte Carlo measures (MCMCs). Three questions motivate and are addressed the analysis. Do estimated ideal points differ significantly across forms of legislative organization? Are some ideal point estimates consistently more accurate than others? Are there patterns of substantively relevant, persistent bias in ideal point estimates? The answers are all affirmative. *Originally presented as "Less Than Ideal Points" at the Meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, 2011. We are grateful for insightful comments from Rob Van Houweling, Gary Cox, and Jonathan Wand.

How does competition for first (candidate) and second ballot (party-list) votes affect the strategic positioning of parties in mixed-member proportional systems? We study this question in a simulation study of multiparty competition in the two tiers. In the first step, we use data from elections for the German Bundestag to estimate individual vote function for each tier based on ideology, policy, and valence incentives. We then use these parameter estimates to calibrate a model in which parties compete for either first-or second-tier votes. Results suggest that parties may face a dilemma when adopting a positional strategy. When national parties and their candidates hold significantly different valences, large valence advantages generate centripetal incentives whereas smaller valences exert a centrifugal pull. Overall, centrifugal incentives dominate the German mixed-member system.

The paper uses an experimental approach to study the voting power distribution in the context of classical preferences, as well as in generalized form which takes into account players' preferences to coalesce with each other. Our results extend those of Montero, Sefton & Zhang (2008), confirming their basic findings using independent experimental data, and explain some of their empirical paradoxes. A major result of our experiment is that even small modifications of preferences lead to statistically significant differences in players' shares, justifying the use of generalized power indices over classical ones. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the interplay of preferences significantly affects the process of bargaining and the resulting coalitions.

We explore how party structures can condition the benefits of decentralization in modern democracies. In particular, we study the interaction of two political institutions: democratic (de)centralization (whether a country has fiscally autonomous and elected local governments) and party (non)integration (whether power over local party leaders flows upwards through party institutions, which we model using control over candidate selection). We incorporate these institutions into our strong decentralization theorem, which expands on Oates (1972) to examine when the decentralized provision of public services will dominate centralized provision even in the presence of inter-jurisdictional spillovers. Our findings suggest that, when externalities are present, democratic decentralization will be beneficial only when parties are integrated. In countries with non-integrated parties, we find that the participation rules of primaries have implications for the expected gains from democratic dece...

We explore how party structures can condition the benefits of decentralization in modern democracies. In particular, we study the interaction of two political institutions: democratic (de)centralization (whether a country has fiscally autonomous and elected local governments) and party (non)integration (whether power over local party leaders flows upwards through party institutions, which we model using control over candidate selection). We incorporate these institutions into our strong decentralization theorem, which expands on Oates (1972) to examine when the decentralized provision of public services will dominate centralized provision even in the presence of inter-jurisdictional spillovers. Our findings suggest that, when externalities are present, democratic decentralization will be beneficial only when parties are integrated. In countries with non-integrated parties, we find that the participation rules of primaries have implications for the expected gains from democratic dece...

How does policy information flow through Washington `issue networks'? And how does information flow determine which lobbyists get access in policy-making? Drawing upon the `strength of weak ties' argument, the authors argue that policy information passes more through acquaintances (`weak ties') than through close, trusted, contacts (`strong ties'). They support this argument in an analysis of data on lobbying networks in health-care policy-making in the 1970s and 1980s. The statistical analyses show that access to policy-makers in Washington is network-autocorrelated: a lobbyist's access depends upon the access of other lobbyists s/he knows. The results demonstrate the importance of weak ties as a restricted form of `social capital' in policy-making.

The evaluation of voters over candidates that compete for o¢ ce can be distorted by the political decisions of an incumbent government. In this paper we analyze, from a theoretical viewpoint, how the likelihood of reelection can be in ‡uenced by tax reforms a¤ecting the set of swing voters. We consider a two-party system in a two-period model. We …nd that government persuades voters by modifying the progressive of the tax scheme. We show that when the opponent internalizes this persuasive e¤ects, the party in o¢ ce reduces the electoral use of tax reforms.

E R if strategic questions remain open when it starts. But the strategic possibilities of campaigns seem most obvious for single-member plurality or Arst past the post (FPP) systems. What of proportional representation (PR) systems? This essay explores the possibilities for strategic dynamics in New Zealand, once the ideal type of Westminster parliamentarism (Lijphart 1984) but now a thoroughly proportional system with coalition governments. The 1996 New Zealand election was the Arst fought under PR.

We present a study of the network of relationships among elected members of the Finnish parliament, based on a quantitative analysis of initiative co-signatures, and its evolution over 16 years. To understand the structure of the parliament, we constructed a statistically validated network of members, based on the similarity between the patterns of initiatives they signed. We looked for communities within the network and characterized them in terms of members' attributes, such as electoral district and party. To gain insight on the nested structure of communities, we constructed a hierarchical tree of members from the correlation matrix. Afterwards, we studied parliament dynamics yearly, with a focus on correlations within and between parties, by also distinguishing between government and opposition. Finally, we investigated the role played by specific individuals, at a local level. In particular, whether they act as proponents who gather consensus, or as signers. Our results provide a quantitative background to current theories in political science. From a methodological point of view, our network approach has proven able to highlight both local and global features of a complex social system.

We propose a model of political competition not over policy programs, but over ideologies: models of the world that organize voters' experiences and guide the inferences they draw from observed outcomes. Policy‐motivated political parties develop ideologies, and voters choose the ideology that best explains their observations. Preferences over policies are then induced by the adopted ideology. Parties thus care about winning the ideological battle as it confers an advantage in the electoral arena. We show that in equilibrium political parties always propose different models of the world. This divergence extends to all features of the environment, not just policy dimensions. A lower degree of policy extremism in the past increases the divergence on the policy dimension, thus leading to higher ideological polarization.

Political parties sometimes adopt unpopular positions that condemn them to electoral defeat. This phenomenon is usually ascribed to expressive motives—namely, parties’ desire to maintain their ideological purity. Could ideological parties instead have strategic incentives to lose? To answer this question, I present a model of repeated spatial elections in which voters face uncertainty about their preferred policy and learn via experience. The amount of voter learning, I show, depends on the location of the implemented policy: a more radical policy generates more information. For a party whose ideological stance is unpopular with the electorate, this creates a trade-off between winning the upcoming election so as to secure policy influence and changing voters’ preferences so as to win with a better platform in the future. Under some conditions the party gambles on the future. It chooses to lose today to possibly change voters’ views and win big tomorrow.

Bethmann Hollweg.1 They largely overlooked the lessons of the American Civil War, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, the Boer War, and the Russo-Japanese War, which had demonstrated the power of the new defensive technologies. Instead, Europeans embraced a set of political and military myths which obscured both the defender's advantages and the obstacles an aggressor would confront. This mindset helped to mold the offensive military doctrines which every European power adopted during the period 1892-1913.2 In Germany, the military glorified the offense in strident terms, and inculcated German society with similar views. General Alfred von Schlieffen, author of the 1914 German war plan, declared that "Attack is the best defense," while the popular publicist Friedrich von Bernhardi proclaimed that "the offensive mode of action is by far superior to the defensive mode," and that "the superiority of offensive warfare under modern conditions is greater than formerly."3 German Chief of Staff General Helmuth von Moltke also endorsed "the principle that the offensive is the best defense," while General August von Keim, founder of the Army League, argued that "Germany ought to be armed for attack," since "the offensive is the only way of insuring victory."4 These assumptions guided the Schlieffen Plan, which envisaged Cult of the Offensive | 61 ... We also must follow this example."12 Even in Belgium the offensive found proponents: under the influence of French ideas, some Belgian officers favored an offensive strategy, proposing the remarkable argument that "To ensure against our being ignored it was essential that we should attack," and declaring that "We must hit them where it hurts. "13 Mythical or mystical arguments obscured the technical dominion of the defense, giving this faith in the offense aspects of a cult, or a mystique, as Marshall Joffre remarked in his memoirs.14 For instance, Foch mistakenly argued that the machine gun actually strengthened the offense: "Any improvement of firearms is ultimately bound to add strength to the offensive.. .. Nothing is easier than to give a mathematical demonstration of that truth." If two thousand men attacked one thousand, each man in both groups firing his rifle once a minute, he explained, the "balance in favor of the attack" was one thousand bullets per minute. But if both sides could fire ten times per minute, the "balance in favor of the attacker" would increase to ten thousand, giving the attack the overall advantage.15 With equally forced logic, Bernhardi wrote that the larger the army the longer defensive measures would take to execute, owing to "the difficulty of moving masses"; hence, he argued, as armies grew, so would the relative power of the offense.16 British and French officers suggested that superior morale on the attacking side could overcome superior defensive firepower, and that this superiority in morale could be achieved simply by assuming the role of attacker, since offense was a morale-building activity. One French officer contended that "the offensive doubles the energy of the troops" and "concentrates the thoughts of the commander on a single objective,"'17 while British officers declared that "Modern [war] conditions have enormously increased the value of moral quality," and "the moral attributes [are] the primary causes of all great success."'18 In short, mind would prevail over matter; morale would triumph over machine guns.

Electoral rules and constitutional structures can influence the level of political corruption. We show that proportional representation (PR) systems are more susceptible to corrupt political rent-seeking than plurality systems. We argue that this result depends on the different loci of rents in PR and plurality systems, and on the monitoring difficulties faced by both voters and opposition parties under PR. We also examine the interaction between electoral rules and presidentialism. We test our main predictions and interaction effects on a cross-section of up to ninety-four democracies. The empirical findings strongly support our hypothesis that PR systems, especially together with presidentialism, are associated with higher levels of corrupt political rent-seeking.

Higher levels of government expenditures and more regulation naturally invite corruption, because they provide the opportunity for government officials to be paid off for regulatory favors, subsidies, and government contracts. Some countries have relatively large governments but lower levels of corruption. Scandinavian countries offer examples. While institutional differences may explain some of the crosscountry differences in corruption, the most consistent relationship is that high levels of regulation are associated with more corruption. When looking at the effect of the size of government, it is the regulatory state, rather than the productive or redistributive state, that is associated with corruption.

This paper introduces a methodology for strategic intervention in collective aeclsion making. The methodology is based on (1) a decomposition of the problem into a few main controversial issues, (2) systematic interviews of subject area specialists to obtain a specification of the decision setting, consisting of a list of stakeholders with their capabilities, positions, and salience on each of the issues; (3) computer simulation. The computer simulation models incorporate only the main processes through which differences in positions and salience are accommodated in binding decisions: management of meaning through the provision of convincing information, challenges, and exchanges. The methodology generates insights into the likely outcomes of the process, the amount of conflict involved, and the stability of the outcomes. These insights and the investigation of the effects of strategic moves provide major strategic advantages to the user. This is likely to lead to a better representation of the user's own position in the decision outcome and the creation of a broader political and social support behind the decision outcome.

Why do some trade negotiations conclude with preferential trade agreements, while others drag on indefinitely? Departing from prior focuses on established cooperation, this study emphasizes the trade negotiation process and accounts for the unconcluded talks. I argue that domestic uncertainties induced by political systems and elections will influence negotiation lengths and outcomes. On the one hand, political systems' cohesion and efficiency in decision-making may affect the progress of trade negotiations. On the other hand, the unpredictability of electoral outcomes and calendars may prolong trade negotiations. To have a complete picture of trade negotiations, I collected an original Trade Bargaining Dataset, which contains information on both concluded and unconcluded talks. To test the hypotheses, I use a sample of 157 negotiations from 1980 to 2016, in which at least one negotiating country is from the Indo-Pacific region. The results from the Cox proportional hazard models show that parliamentary systems make negotiations smoother than presidential systems. Additionally, negotiating governments are not likely to sign agreements in election years, particularly in the elections of parliamentary and democratic countries. This study contributes to the trade cooperation literature by highlighting the variations in negotiation outcomes and offering a novel approach to investigating the negotiation process.