The bargaining product of the Amsterdam Intergovernmental Conference—the Amsterdam Treaty—dwindled down the draft proposal to a consensus set of all fifteen member states of the European Union (EU). Using the two-level concept of international bargains, we provide a thorough analysis of how this consensus set was reached by issue subtraction with respect to domestic ratification constraints. Drawing on data sets covering the positions of all negotiating actors and ratifying national political parties, we first highlight the differences in the Amsterdam ratification procedures in the fifteen member states of the EU. This analysis allows us to compare the varying ratification difficulties in each country. Second, our empirical analysis of the treaty negotiations shows that member states excluded half of the Amsterdam bargaining issues to secure a smooth ratification. Because member states with higher domestic ratification constraints performed better in eliminating uncomfortable issues at the Amsterdam Intergovernmental Conference, issue subtraction can be explained by the extent to which the negotiators were constrained by domestic interests.

Since, at least, the Persian Gulf War, states have behaved “as if” it is costly to be unsuccessful in acquiring the legitimacy the UN Security Council confers on uses of force. This observation is puzzling for theories that seek the origins of modern institutional legitimacy in legalities or moral values. I argue that when governments and citizens look for an authority to legitimize the use of force, they generally do not seek an independent judgment on the appropriateness of an intervention but political reassurance about the consequences of proposed military adventures. Council decisions legitimize or delegitimize uses of force in the sense that they form widely accepted political judgments on whether uses of force transgress a limit that should be defended. These judgments become focal points in the collaboration and coordination dilemmas states face in enforcing limits to U.S. power while preserving mutually beneficial cooperation. In this article, I discuss the implications for the Council's legitimacy and theories of international legitimacy.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2003 International Studies Association Conference, Portland, Ore., 1 March; the 2003 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 29 August; Columbia University International Politics Series, New York, 29 September 2003; and the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge, 6 October 2003. I thank the participants in these seminars, the editor, and anonymous referees of International Organization; and I also thank Bob Axelrod, Bruce Cronin, Michael Dark, Monica Duffy Toft, Nisha Fazal, Jim Fearon, Martha Finnemore, Page Fortna, Stacy Goddard, Macartan Humphries, Ian Hurd, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Andrew Kydd, Edward Miller, Katia Papagianni, Rita Parhad, Holger Schmidt, Arturo Sotomayor, and Joel Westra for useful comments, suggestions, and corrections. As usual, remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the author.

Models of trade policy often depend on the efficient aggregation of individual preferences. While much of the recent empirical work on trade focuses on whether domestic coalitions form along class or sectoral lines, the process of preference aggregation itself remains understudied. In democratic countries, voting is typically assumed to be an unproblematic mechanism for aggregating preferences, but such an assumption may be misleading when the salience of trade policy is low or heterogeneous throughout the electorate. Using data from a survey of 36,501 potential voters in the 2006 U.S. midterm congressional elections, this article explores the salience of trade policy for voters as a whole and for populations predicted to be most affected by changing trade patterns. The article offers an estimation of trade policy salience based on the degree to which voters held Senate incumbents accountable for their 2005 vote on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, relative to roll call votes on other issues of the day. The article finds trade policy salience to be relatively low in terms of stated importance, in voters' knowledge of their representatives' policy positions, and in its effect on voters' propensity to vote for the incumbent. The low salience of trade policy, particularly among highly affected groups, calls into question voter-driven models of trade policy.

I present a theory of effective diplomacy based on honesty and reputations. I model diplomacy as a form of “cheap talk” and international interactions as an infinitely repeated game in which similar states find themselves in disparate situations over time. The theory explains the success and failure of diplomacy. Reputations for honesty make honest communication possible. A state caught bluffing is less able to communicate and less likely to attain its goals in the near future. These findings imply that domestic audience costs are unnecessary for international signaling and that military strength is not the only way to build credibility.

A populist backlash to globalization has ushered in nationalist governments and challenged core features of the Liberal International Order. Although startling in scope and urgency, the populist wave has been developing in declining regions of wealthy countries for some time. Trade, offshoring, and automation have steadily reduced the number of available jobs and the wages of industrial workers since at least the 1970s. The decline in manufacturing employment initiated the deterioration of social and economic conditions in affected communities, exacerbating inequalities between depressed rural areas and small cities and towns, on the one hand, and thriving cities, on the other. The global financial crisis of 2008 catalyzed these divisions, as communities already in decline suffered deeper and longer economic downturns than metropolitan areas, where superstar knowledge, technology, and service-oriented firms agglomerate. We document many of these trends across the United States and Europe, and demonstrate that populist support is strongest in communities that experienced long-term economic and social decline. Institutional differences in labor markets and electoral rules across developed democracies may explain some of the variation in populists’ electoral success. Renewed support for the Liberal International Order may require a rejuvenation of distressed communities and a reduction of stark regional inequalities.

International trade directly influences US presidential elections. We explore the electoral implications of the increasing tradability of services and the large US surplus in services trade. Our paper builds on prior work showing that job insecurity from import competition in manufacturing diminishes political support for incumbents. We construct novel measures of the tradability of an industry using establishment-level data covering nearly all US economic activity. We find increases in incumbent party vote shares in counties with large numbers of workers in high-skilled tradable services as well as goods, and decreases in counties with high employment in low-skilled manufacturing. Incumbent parties are particularly vulnerable to losing votes in swing states with many low-skilled manufacturing workers. In national-level models, we show for the first time that increasing imports (exports) are associated with decreasing (increasing) presidential incumbent vote shares. The national-level effects are large and politically consequential. We also find an Electoral College incentive to protect the manufacturing sector and to oppose trade agreements.

Has foreign aid destroyed state institutions in Africa? African states depend on development assistance to conduct basic government operations, yet few of these states are well governed or effective at providing public goods. The two trends, mounting foreign aid and static or diminishing state performance, raise an obvious question: Is aid dependency contributing to misrule and state failure in Africa? Many critics argue the two phenomena are related. I find they are not. My analysis fails to show a negative association between aid receipts and two measures of democracy and economic freedom. Instead, the evidence is consistent with a small, positive relationship between aid and these indicators of state performance. Since the international community seems bent on reducing foreign aid, an important issue is how African states can maintain and improve their performance with less foreign assistance.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) is widely recognized not only as an important actor in the process of European integration but also as a strategic actor in its own right. In the last four years the literature on the Court has dramatically expanded, nourishing a lively debate between neofunctionalists and intergovernmentalists. But this debate has now reached the limits of its usefulness. Both neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism neglect the range of specific motives and constraints shaping the behavior of individual litigants and national courts; further, both insist on modeling the state as a unitary actor. New scholarship on public interest and corporate litigants in the EU and on the relationship between the ECJ and national courts highlights these failings. Reviewing the literature, this essay develops a model of the legal integration process that encompasses disaggregated state actors—courts, regulatory agencies, executives, and legislatures—interacting with both supranational institutions and private actors in domestic and transnational society. It distills new data and theoretical insights to specify the preferences of some of these actors and the constraints they face in implementing those preferences.

Realism explains the ruling of the international system through the underlying distribution of power among states. Increasingly, analysts have found this power analysis inadequate, and they have developed new concepts, most prominently structural power. The usage of structural power actually entails three different meanings, namely indirect institutional power, nonintentional power, and impersonal power. Only the first, however, is compatible with the current neorealist choice-theoretical mode of explanation. This is the basic paradox of recent power approaches: by wanting to retain the central role of power, some international relations and international political economy theory is compelled to expand that concept and to move away from the very theory that claims to be based on power. Neorealism does not take power seriously enough. At the same time, these extensions of the concept are themselves partly fallacious. To account simultaneously for the different meanings of structural power and to avoid a conceptual overload, this article proposes that any power analysis should necessarily include a pair or dyad of concepts of power, linking agent power and impersonal governance. Finally, it sketches some consequences of those concepts for international theory.

Does the economic integration of a group of nations automatically trigger political unity? Must economic unions be perceived as “successful” in order to lead to political unification? Or are the two processes quite distinct, requiring deliberate political steps because purely economic arrangements are generally inadequate for ushering in political unity?

In the aftermath of war, what determines whether peace lasts or fighting resumes, and what can be done to foster durable peace? Drawing on theories of cooperation, I argue that belligerents can overcome the obstacles to peace by implementing measures that alter incentives, reduce uncertainty about intentions, and manage accidents. A counterargument suggests that agreements are epiphenomenal, merely reflecting the underlying probability of war resumption. I test hypotheses about the durability of peace using hazard analysis. Controlling for factors (including the decisiveness of victory, the cost of war, relative capabilities, and others) that affect the baseline prospects for peace, I find that stronger agreements enhance the durability of peace. In particular, measures such as the creation of demilitarized zones, explicit third-party guarantees, peacekeeping, and joint commissions for dispute resolution affect the duration of peace. Agreements are not merely scraps of paper; rather, their content matters in the construction of peace that lasts.

This article aims to rethink the operation of norms in international policy diffusion. Norms do not simply standardize state behaviors, as is conventionally argued; norms also draw on and set up hierarchical social orders among states. Through a conceptual rethinking we gain a better understanding of where—among which states—new policies may first emerge: social hierarchies create incentives for new policies to develop at the margins of international society so that policies may diffuse “from below.” We also get a better grasp of how policy advocates frame the appropriateness or benefits of a new state practice: they must frame policy demands in terms of the international standing and rank of the targeted state. This article's empirical aspiration is to use these insights to help account for the international policy diffusion of legal sex quotas, a policy to increase the level of female legislators that developed first among “developing” states rather than among the so-called core of international society. By pointing to the link between norms and social hierarchy, the article helps account for policy diffusion “from below.”

While a number of significant campaigns since the early 1990s have resulted in bans of particular weapons, at least as many equivalent systems have gone unscrutinized and uncondemned by transnational campaigners. How can this variation be explained? Focusing on the issue area of arms control advocacy, this article argues that an important influence on the advocacy agenda within transnational networks is the decision-making process not of norm entrepreneurs nor of states but of highly connected organizations within a given network. The argument is illustrated through a comparison between existing norms against landmines and blinding laser weapons, and the absence of serious current consideration of such norms against depleted uranium and autonomous weapons. Thus, the process of organizational issue selection within nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations (IOs) most central to particular advocacy networks, rather than the existence of transnational networks around an issue per se, should be a closer focus of attention for scholars interested in norm creation in world politics.

Explanatory typologies are powerful tools in the qualitative study of international politics. They are likely to be most valuable when scholars systematically apply shared techniques. This article provides an account of analytic steps used in working with typologies, and an accessible vocabulary to describe them. These analytic steps are illustrated with concrete examples drawn from prominent versions of offensive structural, defensive structural, and neoclassical realism. Five forms of cell compression—rescaling and indexing, as well as logical, empirical, and pragmatic compression—are considered, along with the drawbacks associated with each. The expansion of a partial typology and the rediscovery of deleted cells are also discussed. Finally, the article considers the potential drawbacks of a typological approach, and argues that scholars must be mindful of the risks of reification and of relabeling anomalies.I am especially grateful to David Collier for extensive critiques of several drafts of this article. Stephen G. Walker, Miriam Fendius Elman, James Mahoney, Gary Goertz, Reilly O'Neal, John Gerring, Bear Braumoeller, Lisa Martin, two anonymous reviewers, and the participants at the January 2004 Institute for Qualitative Research Methods at Arizona State University provided valuable comments. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Ryan Davis, Michael Jensen and Mallory Hutchison provided greatly appreciated research assistance. Templates for dichotomous and trichotomous four-variable property spaces are available from [email protected].

To explain the strong finding that democracies rarely fight other democracies, analysts typically focus on some attribute of regime type. This linkage may be spurious, at least in part. The emergence and persistence of the first wave of liberal republics and democracies were greatly facilitated by the prior resolution of regional primacy questions. Because early democracies did not engage fully in competitions for regional primacy and territorial expansion, they were less likely to attack other states, democracies or otherwise, in their home regions. Nonexpansionist foreign policies also discouraged the domestic concentration of economic and political power, which in turn facilitated democratization processes. Four historical cases illustrate how regional primacy issues preceded the development of democracy and either undermined or facilitated democratization processes in major powers that have been especially important to the annals of war participation. Further research on whether peace antecedes democracy or the other way around appears warranted.

Foreign aid often is interpreted as an international projection of domestic income redistribution mechanisms, and many authors suggest that differences between welfare states account for variations in donor behavior. A new understanding of the welfare state can improve traditional explanations of this linkage. Existing studies of the welfare–aid relationship use two welfare state indicators: domestic spending and partisan politics. We propose a third type of indicator—the institutional attributes of the welfare state—and demonstrate its relevance. The level of foreign aid provided by a country varies with social spending, but even more so with the degree to which its welfare state embodies socialist attributes. This finding helps explain how domestic political institutions influence the evolution of international cooperation and, specifically, how welfare principles institutionalized at the domestic level shape the participation of developed countries in the international aid regime.

Nontariff barriers to trade are most pervasive when deteriorating macroeconomic conditions give rise to demands for protection by pressure groups, when countries are sufficiently large to give policymakers incentives to impose protection, and when domestic institutions enhance the ability of public officials to act on these incentives. Statistical results based on a sample of advanced industrial countries during the 1980s support the argument that the incidence of nontariff barriers tends to be greatest when the preferences of pressure groups and policymakers converge. More attention should be devoted to the interaction between societal and statist factors in cross-national studies of trade policy.

One of the most important developments in the world economy during the past three decades has been the willingness of governments in emerging markets to liberalize controls over international capital movements—a process known as capital account liberalization. What accounts for this trend? While existing research highlights a number of important factors, it neglects the role played by the rise and spread of neoliberal ideas that prioritized liberalization as a policy choice. Extending the literature on epistemic communities, I argue one critical mechanism shaping policy decisions is the formation of a coherent team of neoliberal economists. Using a new data set that codes the professional training of more than 1500 policymakers in emerging markets, I assess the relative importance of this argument quantitatively on a sample of twenty-nine emerging markets from 1977 to 1999. In order to assess the independent effect of neoliberal economists, I also take into account the endogeneity of the appointment process, assessing whether appointments are driven by credibility concerns, political interests, or economic conditions. I also stress that a fuller understanding of the appointment process necessitates a focus on the social environment in which appointments are situated.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security (PIPES), University of Chicago, 28 April 2005; the 99th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 28–31 August 2003; and the Meeting of the Working Group on Political Economy, European University Institute (EUI), San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy, 29 October 2003. The author is grateful for helpful comments on earlier drafts provided by David Andrews, Benjamin J. Cohen, Scott Cooper, Garrett Glasgow, Lloyd Gruber, Emilie Hafner-Burton, Bob Hancke, Joseph Jupille, Ralf Leiteritz, Charles Lipson, Layna Mosley, Lou Pauly, Andy Sobel, Duncan Snidal, Lora Viola, and participants in the PIPES workshop. The author would also like to thank Lisa Martin and the anonymous reviewers for their many suggestions and insightful comments on previous versions of this manuscript. Research support provided by the Department of Political Science at Syracuse University and a Jean Monnet Fellowship from the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the EUI is also gratefully acknowledged.

Many have argued that the success of European integration is predicated on reinforcing market structures and some have gone further to state that the creation of a transnational market results in a decoupling of markets from their national political and social frameworks, thus threatening to unravel historical social bargains. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and John Ruggie and using their insights regarding the social embedding of markets, we dissent from this view by examining how the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has handled a key sector of the emerging European market—labor mobility. We argue that rather than disembedding markets, decisions of the ECJ—just as Polanyi and Ruggie would have predicted—activate new social and political arrangements. We find evidence for the development of a new legal and political structure, largely inspired by the Court but also imbricated in European Union legislation, at the regional level.

Contemporary conflict research usually measures the influence of ethnicity on conflict by capturing ethnic constellations as country-based indices, such as ethnic fractionalization or polarization. However, such aggregated measures are likely to conceal the actual operation of actor-specific mechanisms. In this article, therefore, we introduce a disaggregated model that measures ethnic groups' access to power. We do so by disaggregating both ethnicity and conflict to the level of explicitly geo-coded center-periphery dyads. This procedure allows us to measure the power balance between politically excluded ethnic groups and dominant actors in terms of group sizes, distances between the center and the periphery, and the roughness of the latter's terrain. We rely on geographic information systems (GIS) to compute demographic and ethno-geographic variables. The dyadic analysis enables us to show that exclusion of powerful ethnic minorities increases the likelihood of conflict considerably. In addition, we show that the risk of conflict is positively associated with the extent of rough terrain in the peripheral group's home region and its distance from the political center.