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Political Science research encounters inferences across levels of analysis; however, they are fraught with challenges. After introducing voting examples of aggregation bias, problems posed by aggregation bias are summarized more generally. Subsequently, the article reviews the major methodological approaches to overcome aggregation bias and to solve the ecological inference (disaggregation) problem. The article highlights the possibility that aggregation bias may lead governments to accept (or reject) international climate agreements when negotiating as blocs of countries as compared to the distribution of the preferences of all countries involved in the negotiations. Keywords: cross-level inference, political science, aggregation bias, ecological fallacy.

A no-regime counterfactual and collective optimum are derived through a political-economic cost/benefit analysis, representing the lower and upper bounds of a means of measuring the impact of international governance on the environment. Implications for its use in developing public policy are also discussed.