How Does the LLAP Affect States Decision-Making? Or Is It Just a Scholarly Device?
The Law of the Least Ambitious Program (LLAP) is primarily a scholarly device used to simplify conclusion-making under some fairly common assumptions like unanimity voting. The LLAP says that under unanimity voting, the ‘least ambitious’ program — the one that wants to do the least, on whatever the issue is — will be the outcome. Unanimity voting is the most common form of decision rule in international organizations, whether de jure (by law) or de facto (in practice), so on its face this ‘law’ would help us predict a lot of outcomes if we know states’ preferences. Since unanimity is the default rule, and states are familiar with this, they recognize something like the functional equivalent of the LLAP. It’s a generally accepted tenet of interstate bargaining that the biggest holdouts or most reluctant parties will need some inducement (via side payments or whatever) to get them to agree to anything besides their most preferred outcome. Thus there is bargaining advantage to be had fr
