Much of the contemporary literature on the utility of international sanctions approaches the apparent riddle of why sanctions are embraced so eagerly when they are supposedly such an “ineffective” tool of statecraft by focusing on the instrumental and rational purposes of sanctions. As a result, one purpose that does not always lend itself to a rational means-end calculus—the purpose of punishment—tends to be overlooked or, more commonly, dismissed outright. This article explores punishment as both a useful and an effective purpose of international sanctions. It argues not only that sanctions should be distinguished from other forms of hurtful statecraft but also that they are a form of “international punishment” for wrongdoing, despite the difficulties of applying the term “punishment” in the context of international relations. The article then examines the purposes of punishment and reveals that only some are understandable when a model of means-end rationality is used, suggesting that the element of the nonrational also plays an important role in international sanctions. The argument is then applied to the case of U.S. sanctions imposed after the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan to demonstrate the different purposes of punishment at work in this case. The article concludes that just as we cannot understand punishment as a purposive human activity solely by reference to a rational model of a means to a clearly delineated end, so too we cannot entirely understand sanctions as a form of international punishment by an attachment to a rational model of policy behavior. However, some forms of punishment are exceedingly effective, and this may explain why sanctions continue to be a popular instrument of statecraft.

International organizations (IOs) have long been a central focus of scholarship in international relations, yet we know remarkably little about their performance. This article offers an explanation for differences in the performance of IOs and tests it using the first quantitative data set on the topic. I argue that the primary obstacle to effective institutional performance is not deviant behavior by IO officials—as conventional “rogue-agency” analyses suggest—but the propensity of states to use IOs to promote narrow national interests rather than broader organizational objectives. IOs that enjoy policy autonomy vis-à-vis states will thus exhibit higher levels of performance. However, in the international context policy autonomy cannot be guaranteed by institutional design. Instead, it is a function of (1) the existence of (certain types of) institutionalized alliances between IOs and actors above and below the state; and (2) the technical complexity of IO activities. I provide empirical evidence for the argument by constructing and analyzing a cross-sectional data set on IO performance—based in part on a new wave of official government evaluations of IOs and in part on an original survey of IO staff—and conducting a comparative case study in the realm of global food security.

I argue that two types of veto players matter in the choice of monetary institutions: party veto players and subnational governments, which are strong in federal systems but weak in unitary systems. A crucial issue is whether voters can readily identify the manipulation of the economy with party players. A second issue concerns the national party veto player's ability to control either fiscal or monetary policy. In one-party unitary governments identification and control are clear; parties where such governments are common prefer flexible exchange rates and dependent central banks. In multiparty coalition governments in unitary systems, identification is traditionally difficult, and the ability to target benefits to specific constituencies under fiscal policy makes fiscal policy autonomy more attractive for coalition governments. Such governments prefer central banks that are politically independent but that finance government debt. Under federalism, parties that constitute the central government have less control over fiscal policy and they prefer flexible exchange rates. Subnational governments do not support a dependent central bank that gives more power to the central government.

In recent decades, IGOs, NGOs, private firms and even states have begun to regularly package and distribute information on the relative performance of states. From the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index to the Financial Action Task Force blacklist, global performance indicators (GPIs) are increasingly deployed to influence governance globally. We argue that GPIs derive influence from their ability to frame issues, extend the authority of the creator, and — most importantly — to invoke recurrent comparison that stimulates governments' concerns for their own and their country's reputation. Their public and ongoing ratings and rankings of states are particularly adept at capturing attention not only at elite policy levels but also among other domestic and transnational actors. GPIs thus raise new questions for research on politics and governance globally. What are the social and political effects of this form of information on discourse, policies and behavior? What types of actors can effectively wield GPIs and on what types of issues? In this symposium introduction, we define GPIs, describe their rise, and theorize and discuss these questions in light of the findings of the symposium contributions.

Studies of the effects of interest groups on congressional roll-call voting typically view party and ideology as competing factors and rely on a factoral model of interests or a sectoral model including only interest groups with a direct stake in the vote. We depart from that strategy in several ways. We define interest groups at the level of Standard Industrial Classification two-digit codes and observe the universe of interests. For 1979–90, we use measures of geographically and nongeographically based economic interests to estimate the representative's party and ideology. We also consider the factor endowments of individuals within a district to examine their impact on floor votes. We then investigate the influence of these interests on members' party affiliation and ideology, as well as a pool of five floor votes on foreign trade, using instrumental variables for party and ideology. Economic interests account for a substantial portion of the variance in all cases, and models that also include other explanatory variables are highly accurate in estimating floor votes.

It is commonly thought that there is a trade-off between the breadth and depth of multilateral institutions—that is, multilaterals that are more inclusive in their memberships will necessarily be shallower in their level of cooperation. Using a multilateral bargaining model with self-seeking rational actors, I show that such a trade-off does not exist for a broad class of multilateral cooperation problems. The conclusion that there is a broader-deeper trade-off follows from the assumption that the members of the multilateral must set their policies at an identical level. The multilateral agreement modeled in this article allows states to set their policies at different levels. Once this change is made, there is no broader-deeper trade-off, a finding that has obvious empirical and policy implications. It explains why some regimes are created with fairly large memberships at the outset, and it calls into question the policy prescription of limiting membership of multilateral institutions to a small group of committed cooperators for the class of cooperation problems modeled in this article.I am indebted to the editor, an anonymous reviewer, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, William Clark, Eric Dickson, Catherine Hafer, Charles Holt, Marek Kaminski, Dimitri Landa, Antonio Merlo, Robert Powell, Adam Przeworski, Ann Sartori, Shanker Satyanath, Randall Stone, and the participants at seminars at Rutgers and University of California-Berkeley in May and October 2000, respectively, for comments on earlier drafts of this work. I thank Jon Preimesberger for editorial assistance. All errors remain my responsibility.

As international election monitors have grown active worldwide, their announcements have gained influence. Sometimes, however, they endorse highly flawed elections. Because their leverage rests largely on their credibility, this is puzzling. Understanding the behavior of election monitors is important because they help the international community to evaluate the legitimacy of governments and because their assessments inform the data used by scholars to study democracy. Furthermore, election monitors are also particularly instructive to study because the variety of both intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations that observe elections makes it possible to compare them across many countries and political contexts. This study uses a new dataset of 591 international election-monitoring missions. It shows that despite their official mandate to focus on election norms, monitors do not only consider the elections' quality; their assessments also reflect the interests of their member states or donors as well as other tangential organizational norms. Thus, even when accounting as best as possible for the nature and level of irregularities in an election, monitors' concerns about democracy promotion, violent instability, and organizational politics and preferences are associated with election endorsement. The study also reveals differences in the behavior of intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations and explains why neither can pursue their core objectives single-mindedly.

Domestic economic institutions change through processes of conflict and bargaining. Why do the strongest groups in such conflicts ever change their minds about the acceptability of institutional arrangements they once opposed? Drawing on the cases of Ireland in 1986–87 and Italy in 1989–93, this article demonstrates how the process of common knowledge creation between employers and unions changed the course of negotiations over national wage bargaining institutions. Common knowledge creation happens when existing institutions are in crisis. The institutional experimentation that follows such crises, characterized by deep uncertainty, places a premium on persuasive argument. The ideas most likely to serve as the basis for newly common knowledge will have analytical and distributive appeal to both unions and employers, and they must be ratified in public agreements, which I call common knowledge events. Common knowledge events establish new social facts, which can change the payoffs associated with different institutional outcomes. This can lead even powerful actors to accept institutions they had previously opposed.The author thanks Marius Busemeyer, Mary Louise Culpepper, Keith Darden, Orfeo Fioretos, Archon Fung, Peter Hall, Andrew Martin, Cathie Jo Martin, Victoria Murillo, Kathleen Thelen, and Gunnar Trumbull, along with three anonymous reviewers and the editors of IO, for comments and conversations that improved this article. Ben Ansell and Vikram Siddarth provided valuable research assistance. Financial support from the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University is gratefully acknowledged. Any remaining errors are my own.

In the past fifteen years, financial regulators from the developed world have attempted to create international regulatory standards in a variety of financial issue areas. Their negotiations are notable for the stark variation in the preferences of regulators toward international regulatory harmonization. Certain regulators actively resist any attempts at regulatory harmonization, while others are vocal in their advocacy for an international agreement. When will regulators seek to harmonize their rules with their foreign counterparts? I propose a principal-agent framework for analyzing regulator behavior that views international harmonization as a means of satisfying domestic political pressures. The framework predicts that regulators are more likely to seek international regulatory harmonization when confidence in the stability of financial institutions is declining, and when competitive pressures are increasing from foreign firms facing less stringent regulations. I explore the consistency of the framework with two important cases in the history of international financial regulation: the negotiations among bank regulators leading up to the 1988 Basel Accord on bank capital adequacy, and the negotiations among securities regulators over capital adequacy for securities firms between 1988 and 1992.I thank Gabe Aguilera, David Bach, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Dan Carpenter, Bill Clark, Mark Copelovitch, Jeff Frieden, Dan Gingerich, Dan Ho, Devesh Kapur, Joseph N. R. Sanberg, Ross Schaap, Allan Stam, Matt Stephenson, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of IO for helpful comments, discussions, and feedback. I am also indebted to the thirty current and former regulators and financial industry executives who participated in interviews to advance this project. Finally, I thank the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for European Studies for research funding.

States pursue their cooperative and competitive goals using both public and private policy tools. Yet there is a profound mismatch between the depth, variety, and importance of covert activity and what scholars of International Relations (IR) know about it. This article addresses this gap by analyzing how adversaries struggle for influence within the covert sphere, why they often retreat to it, and when they abandon it. It focuses on secrecy among adversaries intervening in local conflicts and develops a theory about secrecy's utility as a device for creating sustainable limits in war. Drawing on insights about secrecy and face-work from the sociologist Erving Goffman, I show that major powers individually and collectively conceal evidence of foreign involvement when the danger of unintended conflict escalation is acute. Doing so creates a kind of “backstage” in which adversaries can exceed limits on war without stimulating hard-to-resist pressure to escalate further. An important payoff of the theory is making sense of puzzling cases of forbearance: even though adversaries often know about their opponent's covert activity, they often abstain from publicizing it. Such “tacit collusion” arises when both sides seek to manage escalation risks even as they compete for power and refuse to capitulate. The article evaluates the theory via several nested cases of external intervention in the Korean War. Drawing on newly available materials documenting the covert air war between secretly deployed Soviet pilots and Western forces, the cases show how adversaries can successfully limit war by concealing activity from outside audiences. Beyond highlighting the promise in studying the covert realm in world politics, the article has important implications for scholarship on coercive bargaining, reputation, state uses of secrecy, and how regime type influences conflict behavior.

Previous institutional explanations of trade policy have focused on the role of proportional representation on the promotion of free trade. This explanation generates numerous unsolved anomalies and provides limited guidance in explaining the difference between proportional representation countries and between majoritarian countries as well as within-country variation in trade policy. This article introduces a more general institutional theory that argues that the number of access points provided by institutions is the crucial institutional feature, as increasing the number of access points makes lobbying less costly, which benefits protectionists. From this, I hypothesize that the number of parties in government, the number of electoral districts, the nature of the vote, and other such institutions affect the level of protection and that, once these factors are controlled for, proportional representation has no impact on trade policy. I test this theory on tariff data in the post–World War II developed democracies and find broad support for these hypotheses.This article was previously presented at the 2004 Annual Meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association. I would like to thank Alan Deardorff, Rob Franzese, Matt Golder, Mike Hanmer, Jude Hays, Cherie Maestas, Corrine McConnaughy, Will Moore, James D. Morrow, Won-Ho Park, and Jeff Staton for advice and comments and Yoshi Ono for excellent research assistance. All errors, of course, remain my own.

A rediscovery of the long-forgotten republican version of liberal political theory has arresting implications for the theory and practice of international relations. Republican liberalism has a theory of security that is superior to realism, because it addresses not only threats of war from other states but also the threat of despotism at home. In this view, a Hobson's choice between anarchy and hierarchy is not necessary because an intermediary structure, here dubbed “negarchy,” is also available. The American Union from 1787 until 1861 is a historical example. This Philadelphian system was not a real state since, for example, the union did not enjoy a monopoly of legitimate violence. Yet neither was it a state system, since the American states lacked sufficient autonomy. While it shared some features with the Westphalian system such as balance of power, it differed fundamentally. Its origins owed something to particular conditions of time and place, and the American Civil War ended this system. Yet close analysis indicates that it may have surprising relevance for the future of contemporary issues such as the European Union and nuclear governance.

Politicians frequently turn to reputational arguments to bolster support for their proposed foreign policies. Yet despite the prevailing belief that domestic audiences care about reputation, there is very little direct evidence that publics care about reputation costs, and very little understanding of how. We propose a dispositional theory of reputation costs in which citizens facing ill-defined strategic situations turn to their core predispositions about foreign affairs in order to weigh competing reputational dimensions. Employing a diverse array of methodological tools—from vignette-based survey experiments to automated text analysis—we show that the mass public has a “taste” for reputation, but understands it in fundamentally different ways, with hawks concerned about the negative reputational consequences of inconsistency, and doves equally concerned with the negative reputational consequences of belligerence and interventionism. In illustrating how reputation costs are in our heads, our findings offer both good and bad news for theories of reputation in IR.

Rationalist accounts of international cooperation maintain that states create international institutions to solve problems of distrust. They rest on a particular notion of trust, a strategic variety in which states trust based on information about others' interests. I seek to overturn this conventional wisdom. Drawing on social psychology, I point to the importance of generalized trust, an ideological belief about the trustworthiness of others in general. Generalized trust precedes institution-building and serves as a form of anarchical social capital, facilitating diffuse reciprocity and allowing state leaders to commit to multilateralism even in cases that rationalists deem inhospitable to cooperation and without the institutional protections that rationalists expect. In case studies of U.S. policy on the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations, I demonstrate that generalized trust is necessary for explaining the origins of American multilateralism and the design of these organizations.

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.

Of all noncombatants in the former Yugoslavia, adult civilian men were most likely to be massacred by enemy forces. Why, therefore, did international agencies mandated with the “protection of civilians” evacuate women and children, but not military-age men, from besieged areas? This article reviews the operational dilemmas faced by protection workers in the former Yugoslavia when negotiating access to civilian populations. I argue that a social constructivist approach incorporating gender analysis is required to explain both the civilian protection community's discourse and its operational behavior. First, gender beliefs constitute the discursive strategies on which civilian protection advocacy is based. Second, gender norms operate in practice to constrain the options available to protection workers in assisting civilians. These two causal pathways converged in the former Yugoslavia to produce effects disastrous to civilians, particularly adult men and male adolescents.

Most researchers interested in the relationship between global markets and public policy focus on advanced industrial democracies. In contrast, we examine competing hypotheses as to globalization's effect on governments by expanding the scope of the discussion to include developing nations. More specifically, we investigate the relationship between international market integration and the evolving burden of taxation on capital, as well as the subsequent response of markets to shifts in tax policy in Latin America since the late 1970s. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find that global market forces are more constraining vis-à-vis tax policy in Latin America than in the world's wealthiest nations. Despite these market-based pressures, however, national politics continue to influence tax policy in Latin America in a manner consistent with findings on advanced industrial democracies. As such, developing nations continue to have some room to manipulate policy, though within the context of a more strictly neoliberal context than their counterparts in advanced industrial democracies.

This paper challenges the long-standing belief that changes in patterns of war and war making caused the emergence of large territorial states. Using new data describing the universe of European states between 1100 and 1790, I find that small political units continued to thrive well into the “age of the territorial state.” Some scholars have argued that changes in the production of violence led to the dominance of geographically large political units during this era. In contrast, I find evidence that variation in patterns of economic development and urban growth caused fragmented political authority in some places and the construction of geographically large territorial states in others. Exploiting random climatic deviations in the propensity of certain geographical areas to support large populations, I show via an instrumental-variables approach that the emergence of towns and cities caused the formation of small and independent states.

This article discusses the dynamics between informal groups of states and the UN Security Council. First, I argue that informal groups have proliferated in response to systemic change. Second, these groups serve as a mechanism that allows for exit from structural constraints of the Security Council and voice for stakeholders in a conflict. In effect, they may narrow the operational and participatory gap growing out of the multiple incapacities that prevents the Council from formulating an effective response to crisis situations. Third, the processes of diplomatic problem solving and its collective legitimation have become increasingly decoupled. The former tends to be delegated to informal groups or coalition of states, while the Council provides the latter. I illustrate how these findings affect one's understanding of power, legitimacy, and change in the theory of international relations.This article is the extensively revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academic Council on the United Nations System in 2003. The project received financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council, United Kingdom (Grant No. R42200024335), and the Centre for International Studies, University of Oxford. The UN Studies Program at Yale University was a frequent host and home over recent years. I would like to express my gratitude for the long-term support and advice of Karl Kaiser, Bruce Russett, James Sutterlin, and especially Neil MacFarlane. I also wish to thank Mats Berdal, Richard Caplan, Sam Daws, Kurt Gaubatz, Marrack Goulding, Jean Krasno, Edward Luck, David Malone, Lisa Martin, James Mayall, Joseph Nye, Adam Roberts, Avi Shlaim, Ngaire Woods, and two anonymous referees for comments and criticism.