Why do international institutions vary so widely in terms of such key institutional features as membership, scope, and flexibility? We argue that international actors are goal-seeking agents who make specific institutional design choices to solve the particular cooperation problems they face in different issue-areas. In this article we introduce the theoretical framework of the Rational Design project. We identify five important features of institutions—membership, scope, centralization, control, and flexibility—and explain their variation in terms of four independent variables that characterize different cooperation problems: distribution, number of actors, enforcement, and uncertainty. We draw on rational choice theory to develop a series of empirically falsifiable conjectures that explain this institutional variation. The authors of the articles in this special issue of International Organization evaluate the conjectures in specific issue-areas and the overall Rational Design approach.

Contemporary international relations are legalized to an impressive extent, yet international legalization displays great variety. A few international institutions and issueareas approach the theoretical ideal of hard legalization, but most international law is "soft" in distinctive ways. Here we explore the reasons for the widespread legalization of international governance and for this great variety in the degrees and forms of legalization. 1 We argue that international actors choose to order their relations through international law and design treaties and other legal arrangements to solve specific substantive and political problems. We further argue that international actors choose softer forms of legalized governance when those forms offer superior institutional solutions. We analyze the benefits and costs of different types of legalization and suggest hypotheses regarding the circumstances that lead actors to select specific forms. We do not purport to develop a full theory of law. Nonetheless, examining these political choices in the spare institutional context of international relations may contribute to a better understanding of the uses of law more generally.We begin by examining the advantages of hard legalization. The term hard law as used in this special issue refers to legally binding obligations that are precise (or can be made precise through adjudication or the issuance of detailed regulations) and that delegate authority for interpreting and implementing the law. 2 Although hard law is not the typical international legal arrangement, a close look at this institutional form provides a baseline for understanding the benefits and costs of all types of legaliza-422 International Organization tion. By using hard law to order their relations, international actors reduce transactions costs, strengthen the credibility of their commitments, expand their available political strategies, and resolve problems of incomplete contracting. Doing so, however, also entails significant costs: hard law restricts actors' behavior and even their sovereignty.While we emphasize the benefits and costs of legalization from a rational perspective focused on interests, law simultaneously engages normative considerations. In addition to requiring commitment to a background set of legal norms 3 -including engagement in established legal processes and discourse-legalization provides actors with a means to instantiate normative values. Legalization has effect through normative standards and processes as well as self-interested calculation, and both interests and values are constraints on the success of law. We consider law as both "contract" and "covenant" to capture these distinct but not incompatible characteristics. Indeed, we reject vigorously the insistence of many international relations specialists that one type of understanding is antithetical to the other. 4 The realm of "soft law" begins once legal arrangements are weakened along one or more of the dimensions of obligation, precision, and delegation. This softening...

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States use formal international organizations (IOs) to manage both their everyday interactions and more dramatic episodes, including international conflicts. Yet, contemporary international theory does not explain the existence or form of IOs. This article addresses the question of why states use formal organizations by investigating the functions IOs perform and the properties that enable them to perform those functions. Starting with a rational-institutionalist perspective that sees IOs as enabling states to achieve their ends, the authors examine power and distributive questions and the role of IOs in creating norms and understanding. Centralization and independence are identified as the key properties of formal organizations, and their importance is illustrated with a wide array of examples. IOs as community representatives further allow states to create and implement community values and enforce international commitments.

We develop an empirically based conception of international legalization to show how law and politics are intertwined across a wide range of institutional forms and to frame the analytic and empirical articles that follow in this volume. International legalization is a form of institutionalization characterized by three dimensions: obligation, precision, and delegation. Obligation means that states are legally bound by rules or commitments and therefore subject to the general rules and procedures of international law. Precision means that the rules are definite, unambiguously defining the conduct they require, authorize, or proscribe. Delegation grants authority to third parties for the implementation of rules, including their interpretation and application, dispute settlement, and (possibly) further rule making. These dimensions are conceptually independent, and each is a matter of degree and gradation. Their various combinations produce a remarkable variety of international legalization. We illustrate a continuum ranging from “hard” legalization (characteristically associated with domestic legal systems) through various forms of “soft” legalization to situations where law is largely absent. Most international legalization lies between the extremes, where actors combine and invoke varying degrees of obligation, precision, and delegation to create subtle blends of politics and law.

Regulation is typically conceived as a two-party relationship between a rule-maker or regulator (R) and a rule-taker or target (T). We set out an agenda for the study of regulation (and rules more broadly) as a three-(or more) party relationship --with intermediaries (I) at the center of the analysis. Intermediaries play major and varied roles in regulation, from providing expertise and feedback to facilitating implementation, monitoring the behavior of regulatory targets and building communities of assurance and trust. After developing the basic RIT model, we discuss important extensions and variations. We then discuss the varieties of regulatory capture that appear where intermediaries are involved.

Hegemonic stability theory has been advanced as an explanation of successful cooperation in the international system. The basis of this “hegemonic cooperation” is the leadership of the hegemonic state; its appeal rests on attractive implications about distribution. However, two distinct strands of the theory (“coercive” and “benevolent”) must be distinguished. These strands have different conceptions of hegemony and the role of hegemonic leaders and so have different implications. Both require us to assume that the underlying international issues are public goods and that the international system does not allow for collective action. The former assumption limits the theory's range of application while the likely failure of the latter means that the theory may be wrong even within this more limited range. Simple formal models demonstrate a conclusion completely at odds with hegemonic stability theory: the decline of a hegemonic power may actually lead to an outcome both collectively superior and distributively preferable than when the hegemon was at the apogee of its power. Thus hegemonic stability is, in fact, only a special case of international cooperation. Understanding cooperation in general requires less restrictive assumptions.

Many political situations involve competitions where winning is more important than doing well. In international politics, this relative gains problem is widely argued to be a major impediment to cooperation under anarchy. After discussing why states might seek relative gains, I demonstrate that the hypothesis holds very different implications from those usually presumed. Relative gains do impede cooperation in the two-actor case and provide an important justification for treating international anarchy as a prisoner's dilemma problem; but if the initial absolute gains situation is not a prisoner's dilemma, relative gains seeking is much less consequential. Its significance is even more attenuated with more than two competitors. Relative gains cannot prop up the realist critique of international cooperation theory, but may affect the pattern of cooperation when a small number of states are the most central international actors.