UNCERTAINTY AND STRATEGY IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP.

Scholars debate the significance of political entrepreneurship at the international and supranational levels, wherein ambitious individual agents are supposed to develop and propose policy in the interstices of traditional, formal governing structures. Although a long stream of scholars have called attention to the increasing prevalence of this practice, others have offered evidence that such political entrepreneurship is only a rare supplement to traditional intergovernmental statecraft. Beyond this, however, there has been little concerted effort to theorize a wide range of outcomes in entrepreneurial efforts at the international level and to specify precisely the conditions under which one of several particular outcomes is most likely. In a modest effort toward filling this gap, the present paper offers a formal model of the relationship between an international political Entrepreneur and a Chief of Government (CoG) and generates a series of hypotheses about how the distribution of information and the relative values for costs and payoffs affect the outcome of their strategic interaction. Hypotheses are considered in light of evidence from the history of the European Communities. The paper demonstrates that strategic interaction and information asymmetries are theoretically and empirically significant components of international political entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]