Theories of government–international court relations assume that judges share an interest in expanding the reach of their court. Yet, casual observation suggests that international judges vary in their activist orientations and that governments selectively appoint judges. This article explores a new data set of dissents in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to estimate the ideal points of judges. The results show that activism-restraint is indeed the main dimension of contestation among judges. Variation in judicial activism cannot be accounted for by different legal cultures of judges or by levels of domestic human rights observance in the judges' countries of origins. Instead, aspiring European Union (EU) members and governments more favorably disposed toward European integration appoint more activist judges. These results imply that politics matters in the appointment of international judges and that EU expansion was an important driving force behind the ECHR's increased activism. More generally, the analysis suggests that agent selection is an important and understudied tool for influencing international organizations.Earlier versions of this article were presented at seminars at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, George Washington, the University of Wisconsin, William and Mary, Princeton, and Georgetown as well as the 2006 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association. I much appreciate comments and suggestions from the participants in those seminars, two anonymous referees, Karen Alter, Freek Bruinsma, Rachel Cichowski, Allison Danner, Darren Hawkins, Larry Helfer, Christopher Joyner, Charles Lipson, Emily Meierding, Andrew Moravcsik, Kimberly Morgan, Eric Posner, Mike Tierney, and Andreas von Staden. I thank Jamie Druckman, Andrew Roberts, and Paul Warwick for making data on cabinet composition available.

This article explores the constructivists' institutional socialization hypothesis, positing that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) make member-state interests more similar over time, thus promoting interest convergence. We first show how this hypothesis can be tested systematically using relatively new data on dyadic interest similarity and joint structured IGO membership, and then we conduct a series of empirical tests. Our results show strong statistical support for the institutional socialization hypothesis, using both global and more restricted regional samples. We also demonstrate how our results are consistent with a longer-term socialization process and cannot be explained by the short-term effect of institutional information. Finally, we show some limits to the institutional socialization hypothesis. Unstructured IGOs reveal no effect in promoting member-state interest convergence. Following recent theory arguing that great powers in the international system often use IGOs for coercive means, we find that institutional socialization gets weaker as the power imbalance within the dyad grows.Thanks to Chuck Boehmer, Heather Elko McKibben, Kate Floros, Erik Gartzke, Chuck Gochman, Michael Goodhart, Yoram Haftel, Volker Krause, Dan London, Andrew Long, Ed Mansfield, Lisa Martin, Tim Nordstrom, Zeki Sarigil, Meg Shannon, Dan Thomas, Lora Viola, Basak Yavcan, and two anonymous reviewers for data, comments, and/or helpful suggestions.

Preferential trade agreements offer members an alternative to dispute settlement at the World Trade Organization. This gives rise to forum shopping, in that complainants can file regionally, multilaterally, or not at all. What explains this choice of forum? I argue that complainants strategically discriminate among overlapping memberships: on a given measure(s), some prefer to set a precedent that bears only on a subset of their trade relations, others a precedent that bears on all their trade relations, while still others prefer not to set a precedent. Thus, the key to forum shopping is not simply which institution is likely to come closest to the complainant's ideal ruling against the defendant, but where the resulting precedent will be more useful in the future, enabling the complainant to bring litigation against other members, rather than helping other members bring litigation against the complainant. I consider disputes over Mexican brooms and Canadian periodicals.For comments, I thank Vinod Aggarwal, Raj Bhala, Jane Bradley, Bill Davey, Rob Howse, Miles Kahler, Simon Lester, Rod Ludema, Ed Mansfield, Lisa Martin, Petros C. Mavroidis, John Odell, Joost Pauwelyn, Amy Porges, Eric Reinhardt, Peter Rosendorff, Ken Scheve, Ed Schwartz, Christina Sevilla, Michael Simon, Jay Smith, Debra Steger, Joel Trachtman, Todd Weiler, seminar participants in the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security (PIPES) at the University of Chicago, and two anonymous referees. All shortcomings are, of course, my own. For research support, I thank the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For research assistance, I thank Alex Muggah, Krzysztof Pelc, and Scott Winter.

Referendum votes on adoption of the euro in Denmark (2000) and Sweden (2003) provide unprecedented natural experiments through which to study the political economy of money. Using exit polling data and multinomial logit statistical models that allow us to separate preferences for the euro from preferences for the European Union (EU), we test economic “calculation” and political “community” as determinants of individual-level preferences over adoption of the euro. We find that “calculation” operates most clearly where, as in Sweden, the choice of a fixed versus a floating exchange rate regime is at stake, while “community” exerts strong effects across the two cases.We would like to thank Krister Andersson, Jerry Cohen, Robert Fishman, Jennifer Fitzgerald, Jeff Frieden, Eric Helleiner, Jacques Hymans, Lars Jonung, Kate McNamara, Jennifer Wolak, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, and Helga Sverrisdottir for outstanding research assistance. We are grateful to Jens Wagner of the Danish Data Archive and Torbjörn Berglund of the Swedish Social Science Dataservice for providing the data used in this note. Neither these individuals nor their respective agencies are responsible for the interpretations contained herein.

A long tradition of research has shown decentralized political structures as an important cause behind lower levels of redistribution and higher levels of inequality. This article offers an alternative interpretation of the association between fragmented fiscal structures and higher levels of inequality. I argue that the distributive effects of decentralization depend on the preexisting territorial patterns of inequality. Therefore, the political choice between alternative fiscal structures is largely driven by their expected distributive consequences. As a result, the territorial structure of inequality becomes an important factor to explain why some fiscal structures are more integrated than others. Two mechanisms link regional income distributions and preferences about the decentralization of redistributive policy: differences in the demand for redistribution associated with interregional income differences, and differences in the demand for social insurance associated with the incidence of labor market risks. I test the argument using a data set of fourteen countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) over the period 1980–2000. In addition, I illustrate the potential of the approach by analyzing why social solidarity remains territorially fragmented in the European Union despite the fact that it has a common currency and a common market.Previous versions of this article were presented in seminars at Cornell University, Syracuse University, Duke University, and the 2005 APSA meetings. I benefited from comments in all these events. In addition, I thank Christopher Anderson, Tony Atkinson, Neal Beck, Carles Boix, Matt Cleary, Thomas R. Cusack, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Gösta Esping-Andersen, Kai Konrad, Mitchell Orenstein, Jonas Pontusson, Adam Przeworski, Jonathan Rodden, David Rueda, David Soskice, Ernesto Stein, Duane Swank, Daniel Treisman, Brian Taylor, Michael Wallerstein, and Erik Wibbels for their very helpful comments on earlier versions. Krishna Ayyangar provided excellent research assistance. Finally, I want to thank Lisa Martin and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions. Financial support from the Juan March Institute, Nuffield College (Oxford), the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and the Center for Policy Research (Syracuse University) is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.

What makes international threats credible? Recent theories point to domestic audience costs—the domestic price a leader would pay for making foreign threats and then backing down. This article provides the first direct evidence of audience costs. The analysis, based on experiments embedded in public opinion surveys, shows that audience costs exist across a wide range of conditions and increase with the level of escalation. The costs are evident throughout the population, and especially among politically active citizens who have the greatest potential to shape government policy. Finally, preliminary evidence suggests that audience costs arise because citizens care about the international reputation of the country or leader. These findings help identify how, and under what conditions, domestic audiences make commitments credible. At the same time, they demonstrate the promise of using experiments to answer previously intractable questions in the field of international relations.I thank Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), the National Science Foundation (CAREER Grant SES-0548285), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for financial support. Colleagues at Knowledge Networks provided invaluable assistance in fielding the surveys. For helpful comments I am grateful to Jim Fearon, Page Fortna, John Freeman, Jon Krosnick, Skip Lupia, Helen Milner, Diana Mutz, Ken Scheve, Ken Schultz, Jas Sekhon, Alastair Smith, Paul Sniderman, Rob Van Houweling, Jonathan Wand, Jessica Weeks, and the anonymous referees. I also thank seminar participants at Berkeley, CASBS, Columbia, Duke, NYU, Rice, and Yale, and conference participations at the International Studies Association and the TESS meetings at the University of Pennsylvania.