Strategic Ratification

Students of negotiations argue that negotiators benefit from their differences with their constituencies. Attempts to formalize this idea have explored a variety of institutional settings but have done so by employing workhorse models that rely on very restrictive assumptions with respect to the dimensionality of the choice space, the preferences of actors and the rationality of actors. All three of these assumptions are shown to be substantively of consequence, leading potentially to an underestimation of the importance of ratifiers and a misidentifaction of the determination of their effects. A model developed in this paper responds to these concerns and finds that ratification effects, working to the benefit of negotiators, obtain consistently in settings where previous models suggest no effects are possible. Furthermore, the model provides rich information relating the types of ratifier to the strength of their influence over outcomes. Negotiators, we find, may benefit from internal dissension within their own group when that dissension produces ratifiers that are extreme, relative to the negotiator, on the dimension along which negotiators disagree with each other; however they benefit more from group homogeneity on the dimension along which negotiators agree. JEL Codes: C78, D74, F13 March 2006 ∗email: [email protected]