International political economy (IPE) should transition to “third-wave” scholarship because Open Economy Politics (OEP), which dominates current American IPE scholarship, can generate inaccurate knowledge. OEP can produce inaccurate knowledge because it studies domestic politics in isolation from international or macro processes. This methodological reductionism is often inappropriate for the phenomena IPE studies because governments inhabit a complex social system. As a result, the political choices that OEP strives to explain are typically a product of the interplay between domestic politics and macro processes. When OEP omits causally significant macro processes from empirical models, the models yield biased inferences about the domestic political relationships under investigation. Although scholars tolerated such errors when the gains from OEP were large, these errors are less tolerable now that OEP has matured. Consequently, the field should transition toward research that is nonreductionist, problem-driven, and pluralistic.

Whereas scholars have typically modeled climate change as a global collective action challenge, we offer a dynamic theory of climate politics based on the present and future revaluation of assets. Climate politics can be understood as a contest between owners of assets that accelerate climate change, such as fossil fuel plants, and owners of assets vulnerable to climate change, such as coastal property. To date, obstruction by “climate-forcing” asset holders has been a large barrier to effective climate policy. But as climate change and decarbonization policies proceed, holders of both climate-forcing and “climate-vulnerable” assets stand to lose some or even all of their assets' value over time, and with them, the basis of their political power. This dynamic contest between opposing interests is likely to intensify in many sites of political contestation, from the subnational to transnational levels. As it does so, climate politics will become increasingly existential, potentially reshaping political alignments within and across countries. Such shifts may further undermine the Liberal International Order (LIO); as countries develop pro-climate policies at different speeds and magnitudes, they will have incentives to diverge from existing arrangements over trade and economic integration.

Bargaining theory is used to evaluate the proposition that asymmetrical economic interdependence among states is a source of political power. It is shown that asymmetrical economic interdependence does not imply that less dependent actors will be able to exercise political influence over more dependent ones. The use of economic interdependence for political influence requires, instead, that the exchange of economic resources for political concessions make both parties to a relationship better off than they would be if they bargained over the distribution of the gains from the economic relationship alone. Whether this is true is independent of the degree of asymmetry in the economic relationship, or its direction. An explanation is given for the fact that other scholars have reached different conclusions, and the implications of these results for our understanding of a variety of types of relations among governments are derived.

Domestic approaches to compliance with international commitments often presume that international law has a distinct effect on the beliefs and preferences of national publics. Studies attempting to estimate the consequences of international law unfortunately face a wide range of empirical and methodological challenges. This article uses an experimental design embedded in two U.S. national surveys to offer direct systematic evidence of international law's effect on mass attitudes. To provide a relatively tough test for international law, the surveys examine public attitudes toward the use of torture, an issue in which national security concerns are often considered paramount. Contrary to the common contention of international law's inefficacy, I find that legal commitments have a discernible impact on public support for the use of torture. The effect of international law is also strongest in those contexts where pressures to resort to torture are at their highest. However, the effects of different dimensions in the level of international agreements' legalization are far from uniform. In contrast to the attention often devoted to binding rules, I find that the level of obligation seems to make little difference on public attitudes toward torture. Rather, the relative precision of the rules, along with the degree to which enforcement is delegated to third parties, plays a much greater role in shaping public preferences. Across both international law and legalization, an individual's political ideology also exerts a strong mediating effect, though in varying directions depending on the design of the agreement. The findings have implications for understanding the overall impact of international law on domestic actors, the importance of institutional design, and the role of political ideology on compliance with international agreements.

The view that unemployment is caused by labor market rigidities and should be addressed through systematic institutional deregulation has gained broad currency and has been embraced by national and international policymaking agencies alike. It is unclear, however, whether there really is robust empirical support for such conclusions. This article engages in an econometric analysis comparing several estimators and specifications. It does not find much robust evidence either of labor market institutions' direct effects on unemployment rate, or of a more indirect impact through the magnitude of adverse shocks. At the same time, we find little support for the opposite, proregulatory position as well: the estimates show a robust positive relationship between union density and unemployment rates; also, there is no robust evidence that the within-country variation of bargaining coordination is associated with lower unemployment (as frequently argued), nor is it clear that bargaining coordination moderates the impact of other institutions. All in all, restrictive monetary policies enacted from an independent central bank and other determinants of real interest rates appear to play a more important role in explaining unemployment than institutional factors.Many thanks to participants in the 2d CofFEE Europe Workshop, as well as Peter Auer, Emilio Castilla, Rob Franzese, Andrew Glyn, Lane Kenworthy, Bernhard Kittel, Stephen Nickell, Michael Piore, Naren Prasad, and Marco Vivarelli for comments on previous versions of this article.

Neofunctional, supranationalist, and constructivist scholars studying European integration hypothesize that social interactions cutting across national borders lead individual actors to shift their allegiance toward the European level. This strong socialization hypothesis presumes that, as a result of prolonged exposure and interactions, individuals adopt role conceptions that promote a sense of “we-ness” and that fit into a view of the European Union (EU) as an autonomous level primarily designed for finding policy solutions in the interest of a common, European, good. In contrast, this article offers an institutional understanding of role enactment that argues that socialization—that is, the adoption of role conceptions—is considerably shaped by actors' embeddedness in multiple European and domestic contexts. Based on quantitative interview data, I demonstrate that, in contrast to the strong socialization hypothesis, extensive exposure to the European level does not necessarily lead to supranational role playing. On the contrary, domestic factors, rather than European-level conditions, positively affect the adoption of supranational role conceptions.Thanks to Ambassador Frans Van Daele and Ambassador Philippe de Shoutheete de Tervarent, who allowed interviews on aspects of this article. I also express my gratitude toward the ISPO-team of the University of Leuven, Belgium, for their help in doing the fieldwork, and to Jan De Bock and Vincent Mertens de Wilmars for the crucial information they provided. Data collection was made possible by a grant from the Fund for Scientific Research–Flanders (Belgium) and was supervised by Guido Dierickx (University of Antwerp, Belgium). Special thanks go to the participants in the various IDNET-workshops and the ARENA research seminar (April 2002), to IO editors Thomas Risse and Lisa Martin, two anonymous reviewers, and Karen Anderson, Morten Egeberg, Jeff Checkel, Alexandra Gheciu, Jeffrey Lewis, Marianne van der Steeg, Mark Rhinard, Jarle Trondal, and Maarten Vink for their extensive and constructive comments.

Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, countries have been able to choose from a variety of exchange-rate arrangements. We argue that politicians' incentives condition the choice of an exchange-rate arrangement. These incentives reflect the configuration of domestic political institutions, particularly electoral and legislative institutions. In systems where the cost of electoral defeat is high and electoral timing is exogenous, politicians will be less willing to forgo their discretion over monetary policy with a fixed exchange rate. In systems where the costs of electoral defeat are low and electoral timing is endogenous, politicians are more likely to adopt a fixed exchange-rate regime. Consequently, differences in domestic political systems can help account for variations in the choice of exchange-rate arrangements. We test this argument using constrained multinomial logit and binomial logit on a sample of twenty democracies over the period 1974–95. Domestic political institutions have a significant effect on exchange-rate regime choice, even after controlling for systemic, macroeconomic, and other political variables.

The distinction between uncertainty and risk, originally drawn by Frank Knight and John Maynard Keynes in the 1920s, remains fundamentally important today. In the presence of uncertainty, market actors and economic policy-makers substitute other methods of decision making for rational calculation—specifically, actors' decisions are rooted in social conventions. Drawing from innovations in financial markets and deliberations among top American monetary authorities in the years before the 2008 crisis, we show how economic actors and policy-makers live in worlds of risk and uncertainty. In that world social conventions deserve much greater attention than conventional IPE analyses accords them. Such conventions must be part of our toolkit as we seek to understand the preferences and strategies of economic and political actors.

A paradox is central to the nature of political boundaries in Africa: there is widespread agreement that the boundaries are arbitrary, yet the vast majority of them have remained virtually untouched since the late 1800s, when they were first demarcated. This article argues that, contrary to current theories, the present boundary system represents a rational response by both the colonialists and the present-day African leaders to the constraints imposed by the demographic and ethnographic structure of the continent. Using this framework of analysis, the article examines the institutions that formulated the decision-making rules for the creation and maintenance of boundaries in Africa, discusses the conditions under which cooperation among states has occurred, and explores the prospects for future changes in the borders of African states.

Systemic theories of international politics are inadequate for explaining particular states' policies, and some neorealists reach for supplementary foreign-policy-level concepts. Yet these studies almost never provide the empirical evidence required by their motivational constructs. Available psychological studies rely too heavily on notions peculiar to the cold war—such as the image of the enemy. A new theory proposes four additional ideal-type images. Each image is likely to lead to a specified set of strategic behaviors. An application to dyadic relations across the Persian Gulf from 1977 through 1990 suggests that this theory can help account for otherwise puzzling behavior, and it illustrates a promising route toward a more sensitive interactionist international relations theory suited both to the former superpower relationship and to diverse others.

The 1990s saw a systemic shift from the liberal post–World War II international order of liberal multilateralism (LIO I) to a post–Cold War international order of postnational liberalism (LIO II). LIO II has not been only rule-based but has openly pursued a liberal social purpose with a significant amount of authority beyond the nation-state. While postnational liberal institutions helped increase overall well-being globally, they were criticized for using double standards and institutionalizing state inequality. We argue that these institutional features of the postnational LIO II led to legitimation problems, which explain both the current wave of contestations and the strategies chosen by different contestants. We develop our argument first by mapping the growing liberal intrusiveness of international institutions. Second, we demonstrate the increased level and variety of contestations in international security and international refugee law. We show that increased liberal intrusiveness has led to a variety of contestation strategies, the choice of which is affected by the preference of a contestant regarding postnational liberalism and its power within the contested institution.

The years immediately after World War II provided American policy makers with a unique opportunity to help shape the international economic order for a generation to come. United States objectives are usually described in terms of enlightened idealism or capitalist expansionism. But much of the way policy makers envisaged international economic reconstruction derived from the ambivalent way in which domestic economic conflict had been resolved before and during the New Deal. In the inconclusive struggle between business champions and the spokesmen for reform, Americans achieved consensus by celebrating a supposedly impartial efficiency and productivity and by condemning allegedly wasteful monopoly. Looking outward during and after World War II, United States representatives condemned Fascism as a form of monopoly power, then later sought to isolate Communist parties and labor unions as adversaries of their priorities of production. American blueprints for international monetary order, policy toward trade unions, and the intervention of occupation authorities in West Germany and Japan sought to transform political issues into problems of output, to adjourn class conflict for a consensus on growth. The American approach was successful because for almost two decades high rates of growth made the politics of productivity apparently pay off. Whether an alternative approach could have achieved more equality remains an important but separate inquiry.

Nations have two methods of increasing their security: building arms and forming alliances. Both methods present different political costs that must be incurred to raise security. Building arms requires shifting economic resources to the military. Forming alliances requires abandoning interests that conflict with those of the ally. Each of these strategies produces domestic opposition. A nation's response to a threat to its security must weigh the relative attractiveness of arms versus allies, both in terms of their effects on internal politics and on their external benefits. Three cases are examined in the light of this argument. The response of Austria and France to the unification of Germany in the 1860s is the central case. Theories of alliance formation based on neorealism and the offense-defense balance predict that Austria and France should have allied against the mutual threat of Prussia. This article argues that they did not form an alliance because arming separately presented lower political costs. World Wars I and II likewise are analyzed from the perspective of the argument above.

What explains the changes in International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality? I argue that IMF conditionality agreements are influenced by supplementary financiers. The IMF regularly relies on external financing to supplement its loans to countries facing payments imbalances. As a result, these supplementary financiers are able to exercise leverage over the IMF and the design of its conditionality programs. I consider the influence of one type of supplementary financier, private financial institutions, on IMF conditionality. “Conclusions are supported by a data set of 249 conditionality arrangements, coded according to their terms, and two case studies.”

Theories of regional integration are becoming obsolescent because three core assumptions on which these theories have been based are becoming less and less relevant to the behavior patterns actually displayed by governments active in regional organizations. These three assumptions are (1) that a definable institutional pattern must mark the outcome of the process of integration, (2) that conflicts of interests involving trade-offs between ties with regional partners and ties with nonmembers should be resolved in favor of regional partners, and (3) that decisions be made on the basis of disjointed incrementalism. The history of the European Communities since 1968 shows that most governments no longer behave in accordance with these assumptions, although they did earlier. The explanation for the new trend is to be found in awareness of the various novel kinds and dimensions of interdependence between countries, issues, and objectives, particularly with reference to policies involving those aspects of highly industrial societies which do not respond readily to the incentives of a customs union. A new decision-making rationality–labelled “fragmented issue linkage”–seems to be competing with incremental habits, suggesting that efforts are being made to cope with “turbulence” in the industrial environment so as to avoid piecemeal solutions. The effort to cope with turbulence, in turn, is unlikely to lead to any “final” set of regional institutions.

I develop a systematic argument about the politics of the 1997–98 Asian economic crisis. I focus on institutions—specifically, the connection linking the institutional framework of national politics, the policy environment, and investment. I seek to resolve the tension between the literatures on credible policy commitment and policy flexibility, arguing that if either is severely undersupplied, the risk associated with the policy environment rises rapidly for investors. Building on a veto player framework, I develop a simple model of a U-shaped relationship between the number of veto players in a political system and policy risk to investors. Institutional vetoes on executive authority lower policy risk for investors but only up to a point, after which additional veto players promote unwelcome policy rigidity. I illustrate this using four cases: Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the four main Southeast Asian countries involved in the financial crisis. I argue that the institutional framework of national politics had a powerful and predictable influence on policy responses and investor reactions.

A central component of International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs is reducing government budget deficits. We ask how domestic political considerations shape the distribution of cuts made by governments in IMF programs. Our central finding is that IMF programs shrink the role played by domestic politics. While democracies allocate larger shares of their budgets to public services in the absence of IMF programs, the difference between democracies and nondemocracies disappears under IMF programs. This result has important implications for our understanding of government spending priorities under different resource constraints.We dedicate this article to the memory of Harold K. Jacobson. Robert Kaufman, Lisa Martin, Joan Nelson, and two anonymous reviewers for IO provided valuable comments on earlier drafts, and Chris Achen, Chris Adolph, Leah Anderson, Carew Boulding, Sarah Brooks, Chelsea Brown, Lawrence Broz, Eric Chang, Dan Corstange, Rob Franzese, Nate Jensen, Marcus Kurtz, Margaret Levi, Autumn Payton, Nita Rudra, Heidi Sherman, and James Vreeland offered helpful advice. We thank Autumn Payton for research assistance. Earlier versions were presented at the 2004 Midwest Political Science Association Meetings, the 2004 American Political Science Association Meetings, the 2005 workshop on “Distributive Politics and Social Protection in the 21st Century” at Ohio State's Mershon Center, and the 2005 International Studies Association Meetings. All errors remain our own.

It remains contested whether peacekeeping works. The impact of peacekeepers’ actions at the local subnational level for overall mission success has lately received critical attention. Local peacekeeping is expected to matter because it reassures local actors, deters resumption of armed hostilities, coerces parties to halt fighting, and makes commitment to agreements credible. Thus peacekeepers affect the relations between central and local elites and avoid the emergence of local power vacuums and areas of lawlessness. This study uses new subnational data on the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers. It uses matching and recursive bivariate probit models with exogenous variables for temporal and spatial variation to deal with possible nonrandom assignment of the treatment. We demonstrate that conflict episodes last for shorter periods when peacekeepers are deployed to conflict-prone locations inside a country, even with comparatively modest deployment. The effect of peacekeeping on the onset of local conflict is, however, less clear cut.

A key assumption of audience costs theories of crisis bargaining and international cooperation is that audience members have strong preferences for consistency between their leader's commitments and actual policy choices. However, audiences also have strong preferences over the policy choices themselves, regardless of their consistency with past commitments. I conducted a randomized survey experiment to evaluate the magnitude of consistency and policy effects in the context of international agreements over trade policy. Respondents with expressed policy preferences, whether supporting or opposing free trade, have muted reactions to learning that their leader has broken an agreement. Only respondents with no opinion on trade policy are affected by learning that their leader's policy is inconsistent with prior commitments. This suggests that constituents' underlying preferences limit the degree to which audience costs influence policymakers' calculations.