Bargaining with Japan: What American Pressure Can and Cannot Do

Bargaining with Japan: What American Pressure Can and Cannot Do. By Leonard J. Schoppa. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 406p. $49.50 cloth, $17.50 paper.

Leonard Schoppa's new book represents an important advance in the study of international trade negotiations, and a giant leap forward for the study of U.S.-Japan trade relations. Schoppa adapts the popular "two-level game" approach to explain variation in the effectiveness of U.S. pressure on Japanese policymaking. It is that variation, he argues, that exposes realist theories as insufficient for explaining international bargaining outcomes. By choosing five U.S.-Japanese disputes that were dealt with simultaneously under the rubric of the 1989 Structural Impediments Initiative (SII) talks, Schoppa is able to hold constant the relative power of the two countries. If the United States was able to win Japanese concessions on distribution policy by virtue of its geopolitical advantages, why was it so ineffective in its efforts to break up the keiretsu business arrangements? Realist theory cannot answer this question, so Schoppa turns to the more nuanced approach that he calls "negotiation-- analytic."

Here the key is that not all issues are processed equally in decision making by either demander or target countries. Different issues involve different combinations of government agencies and different constellations of socioeconomic interests. The participants at the international bargaining table might remain the same, but the number, identity, and relative strengths of participants at the domestic bargaining table vary according to the topic at hand. And it is the outcome at the latter table that determines the outcome at the former.

Schoppa's best insight, however, is not simply that diplomats must bargain in the shadow of issue-specific domestic bargaining coalitions. His most intriguing argument is that the government negotiators from one country can and do take advantage of those variations in the other country, in two ways. First, they can set the negotiating agenda by picking issues for which the target country's domestic coalition for policy change is (or could be) strong. If there are already target-country actors with clout whose interests coincide with those of the demander country, all the better. Second, the demander country might also try to restructure the debate at the target country's domestic bargaining table, through the techniques of "participation expansion," "synergistic linkage," "reverberation,"...