Past decades have witnessed a shift in international cooperation toward growing involvement of transnational actors (TNAs), such as nongovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, and philanthropic foundations. This article offers a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of TNA access to IOs. The analysis builds on a novel data set, covering formal TNA access to 298 organizational bodies from fifty IOs over the time period 1950 to 2010. We identify the most profound patterns in TNA access across time, issue areas, policy functions, and world regions, and statistically test competing explanations of the variation in TNA access. The central results are three-fold. First, the empirical data confirm the existence of a far-reaching institutional transformation of IOs over the past sixty years, pervading all issue areas, policy functions, and world regions. Second, variation in TNA access within and across IOs is mainly explained by a combination of three factors: functional demand for the resources of TNAs, domestic democratic standards in the membership of IOs, and state concerns with national sovereignty. Third, existing research suffers from a selection bias that has led it to overestimate the general importance of a new participatory norm in global governance for the openness of IOs.

Creating institutions that effectively manage interstate conflict is a priority for policy-makers. In this article we demonstrate that military allies are well positioned to influence the crisis-bargaining behavior of both challengers and targets in ways that often lead to peace. Through a three-player game-theoretic model, we demonstrate that a target's alliances not only have an effect on the demand that the challenger makes, but also on the behavior of the target. When a target values an alliance highly, an ally's recommendation for settlement can encourage the target to concede to demands without further escalation. Our statistical analysis provides evidence in support of the theoretical finding. Allies can both deter challengers and restrain partners, and as a result, can encourage peaceful behavior not only from adversaries, but from member states as well. Our study thus sheds new light on the role of military alliances as potential conflict management devices.

This article argues that immigration policy formation in the United States after 1950 can only be understood in the context of the increasing integration of world markets. Increasing trade openness has exposed firms that rely on immigrant labor to foreign competition and increased the likelihood that these firms fail. Increasing openness by other states to foreign direct investment (FDI) allowed these same firms to move production overseas. Firms' choices to close their doors or to move overseas decrease their need for labor at home, leading them to spend their political capital on issues other than immigration. Their lack of support for open immigration, in turn, allows policymakers to restrict immigration. An examination of voting behavior on immigration in the US Senate shows that the integration of world capital and goods markets has had an important effect on the politics of immigration in the United States and shows little support for existing theories of immigration policy formation. In addition to increasing one's understanding of immigration policy, this article sheds light on how trade openness and firms' choice of production location can affect their preference for other foreign economic policies as well as domestic policies such as labor, welfare, and environmental policies.

Why do some decision makers prefer big multilateral agreements while others prefer cooperation in small clubs? Does enforcement encourage or deter institutional cooperation? We use experiments drawn from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology—along with a substantive survey focused on international trade—to illustrate how two behavioral traits (patience and strategic reasoning) of individuals who play key roles in negotiating and ratifying an international treaty shape their preferences for how treaties are designed and whether they are ratified. Patient subjects were more likely to prefer treaties with larger numbers of countries (and larger long-term benefits), as were subjects with the skill to anticipate how others will respond over multiple iterations of strategic games. The presence of an enforcement mechanism increased subjects' willingness to ratify treaties; however, strategic reasoning had double the effect of adding enforcement to a trade agreement: more strategic subjects were particularly likely to favor ratifying the agreement. We report these results for a sample of 509 university students and also show how similar patterns are revealed in a unique sample of ninety-two actual US policy elites. Under some conditions certain types of university student convenience samples can be useful for revealing elite-dominated policy preferences—different types of people in the same situation may prefer to approach decision-making tasks and reason through trade-offs in materially different ways.

If international institutions are such potent alarm mechanisms that mobilize procompliance domestic audiences, as many existing theories argue, why do countries wait so long before sounding the alarm? World Trade Organization (WTO) members often wait months or even years before objecting to their trading partners’ WTO-illegal barriers. To turn a phrase, trade cooperation delayed is trade cooperation denied, so why wait? To explain this variation, I develop a theory of institutional alarm mechanisms in which (1) the preferences and strength of the audience hearing the alarm vary and (2) the decision to sound the alarm is strategic. Sounding the alarm is most valuable when strong audiences in the defendant country support compliance. I test this prediction using competing risks models analyzing the timing of WTO disputes against US tariff barriers. Consistent with the theory, disputes are more likely during election years when macroeconomic indicators suggest broader support for free trade.

Building on the rationalist literature on sanctions, this article argues that economic and political sanctions are a successful tool of nonproliferation policy, but that selection effects have rendered this success largely hidden. Since the late 1970s—when the United States made the threat of sanctions credible through congressional legislation and began regularly employing sanctions against proliferating states—sanctions have been ineffective in halting ongoing nuclear weapons programs, but they have succeeded in deterring states from starting nuclear weapons programs in the first place and have thus contributed to a decline in the rate of nuclear pursuit. The logic of the argument is simple: rational leaders assess the risk of sanctions before initiating a nuclear weapons program, which produces a selection effect whereby states highly vulnerable to sanctions are deterred from starting nuclear weapons programs in the first place, so long as the threat is credible. Vulnerability is a function of a state's level of economic and security dependence on the United States—states with greater dependence have more to lose from US sanctions and are more likely to be sensitive to US-sponsored norms. The end result of this selection effect is that since the late 1970s, only insulated, inward-looking regimes have pursued nuclear weapons and become the target of imposed sanctions, thus rendering the observed success rate of nonproliferation sanctions low. I find support for the argument based on statistical analysis of a global sample of countries from 1950 to 2000, an original data set of US nonproliferation sanctions episodes, and qualitative analysis of the South Korean and Taiwanese nuclear weapons programs.

Existing literature on contentious political movements has generally focused on domestic political activity. Using the new Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior–Middle East data set (MAROB-ME), which contains organization-level data for 104 ethnopolitical organizations in the Middle East and North Africa, we analyze the decision of both violent and nonviolent organizations to engage in political activity transnationally. Among the results, we find that diaspora support is associated with transnational nonviolent protest, whereas foreign state support and domestic repression increase the use of transnational violence. The most robust finding, however, is that participation in the domestic electoral process consistently reduces the likelihood that an organization will engage in any political activity abroad.

Research into the causes of civilian abuse during civil conflict has increased significantly in recent years, yet the mechanisms responsible for changes in actors' tactics remain poorly understood. I investigate how the outcomes of discrete conflict interactions influence subsequent patterns of rebel violence against civilians. Two competing logics suggest opposite influences of material loss on violence. A stylized model of rebel-civilian bargaining illustrates how acute resource demands resulting from recent severe conflict losses may incentivize insurgent violence and predation. I also identify several factors that might condition this relationship. I evaluate hypotheses based on these expectations by first analyzing the behaviors of the Lord's Resistance Army using subnational conflict data and then analyzing a cross-sectional sample of post–Cold War African insurgencies. Results from both the micro- and macrolevel analyses suggest that rising battlefield costs incentivize attacks on civilians in the period immediately following the accrual of losses. However, group-level factors such as effective control over territory and the sources of rebel financing condition this relationship. The findings suggest potential benefits from examining the interaction of strategic conditions and more static organizational characteristics in explaining temporal and geographic variation in rebel violence.