International Cooperation and National Elections

We analyze the effect of international cooperation between representative democracies in a simple two country model with two possible types of externalities: public good spillovers and coordination costs. Political representation allows sophisticated voters to manipulate the policy of the other country by electing a representative with less intense or more extreme preferences at the national level. We show that cooperation between national representatives exacerbate these detrimental incentives at the electoral stage. Because of this effect, in the public good case, cooperation has no net effect while in the coordination case, cooperation is actually detrimental.