The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) of 1934 has long been heralded as a simple institutional reform with revolutionary consequences: namely, by changing the trade policymaking process in the United States, the RTAA is held responsible for the dramatic liberalization in U.S. policy beginning in the 1930s and 1940s. This article takes issue with this conventional wisdom. I argue that the standard accounts—which emphasize the importance of delegation for overcoming logrolling in Congress or for facilitating reciprocity in international trade negotiations—fail to provide an adequate explanation for just how the institutional innovation was achieved and sustained in the face of protectionist opposition. I suggest instead that trade liberalization was driven by exogenous changes in party constituencies and societal preferences that had crucial effects on congressional votes to extend the RTAA authority and liberalize trade after 1945. The preservation of the RTAA program was symptomatic rather than causal; as a consequence, it may well be abandoned in the future. The evolution of U.S. trade policy has been, and will continue to be, powerfully shaped by changes in the preferences of societal groups and in the positions taken by parties on the trade issue.

The WHO/UNICEF International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes was passed by the 1981 World Health Assembly. Subsequent arrangements between the Nestlé Corporation and its nongovernmental critics for the implementation of the code indicate what is possible within the normative framework of an emerging regime on investment and transnational corporations. In the baby food case the context was particularly positive. A high level of consensual knowledge, the successful strategies of nongovernmental organizations, the susceptibility of the involved industries to pressure, the brevity of deliberations, and the conducive atmosphere of the international organization setting all helped negotiators to develop a detailed code of marketing. Actions inside and outside the UN system combined to delegitimize commonly accepted practices, modify global marketing schemes, and alter national health care practices. In other issue-areas, however, such as Pharmaceuticals, the same positive convergence of factors does not yet exist, and the achievement of equally precise codes will be more difficult.

Why do leading actors invest in costly projects that they expect will not yield appreciable military or economic benefits? We identify a causal process in which concerns about legitimacy produce attempts to secure dominance in arenas of high symbolic value by investing wealth and labor into unproductive (in direct military and economic terms) goods and performances. We provide evidence for our claims through a comparative study of the American Project Apollo and the Ming Dynasty's treasure fleets. We locate our argument within a broader constructivist and practice-theoretic understanding of hierarchy and hegemony. We build on claims that world politics is a sphere of complex social stratification by viewing constituent hierarchies in terms of social fields. Our specific theory and broader framework, we contend, provide tools for understanding the workings of power politics beyond military and economic competition.

How do institutions shape revisionist behavior in world politics? Applying a network-relational approach to revisionist states and challenges to institutional order, I conceive of institutions as networks—as patterns of ongoing social transactions in which revisionists are embedded. Revisionist behavior is shaped by how a state is positioned within this existing network of institutions. A state's position significantly influences the material and cultural resources the state can deploy in pursuit of its aims, and thus the revisionist's strategy. Focusing on two measures of network position—access and brokerage—I propose four ideal types of revisionists and their strategies in the international system: integrated revisionists, who are likely to pursue institutional engagement; bridging revisionists, who will seek rule-based revolution; isolated revisionists, who prefer to exit the institutional system; and rogue revisionists, who have few resources at hand, and thus ultimately must resort to hegemonic violence. I test these ideal types in four cases of revisionists and institutional orders: Russia in the 1820s; Prussia in the 1860s; the Soviet Union in the early Cold War; and Japan in the 1920s and 1930s.

How do norms influence choices in social life? Conceptual distinctions among types of norms and suggestions in the work of Hobbes, Hume, and Durkheim help us investigate in greater detail the “woolly” concept of regimes in international relations. When we disaggregate the “set of explicit and implicit norms, rules, and decisionmaking procedures” in a given issue area and focus on the conceptual links between rules, principles (norms), and actions, we gain an understanding of the role of norms in social life that is more comprehensive than the understanding provided by traditional accounts. Furthermore, placing the present regime discussion within wider philosophical traditions enables us to develop a more critical approach to the building of theory in the social sciences, since the use of norms as explanatory devices challenges the predominant positivist outlook in several important respects.

Do the macroeconomic priorities of citizens differ across countries? If so, what accounts for this variation and what are its consequences for explanations of the choice of monetary institutions, macroeconomic policy, and international monetary cooperation? This article uses survey data from twenty advanced economies to examine individual preferences about macroeconomic priorities. The analysis establishes three key findings. First, the results suggest that economic context, defined by inflation and unemployment performance, has a substantial impact on the public's economic objectives in a way that is broadly consistent with the specification of utility/loss functions in the theoretical political economy literature. Second, the results suggest that there is significant cross-country variation in inflation aversion, controlling for economic context. Third, some of this variation is accounted for by national-level factors affecting the aggregate costs of inflation and unemployment. These results have significant implications for optimal monetary policymaking, the explanation of variation in economic outcomes, and for accounts of the choice of institutional frameworks for policymaking.I thank the Bank of England, the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies for research support, and Jim Alt, Andrew Bailey, Bill Bernhard, Lawrence Broz, John Freeman, Jeff Frieden, Jim Granato, Shigeo Hirano, David Lake, Jeff Lax, Simon Price, Rose Razaghian, Ron Rogowski, David Stasavage, Gabriel Sterne, Mike Tomz, Jim Vreeland, the editor, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. All views expressed are those of the author and do not represent those of the Bank of England.

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.

Retributiveness and humanitarianism, predispositions that shape individuals' moral judgment and criminal punishment attitudes, should also influence their positions on war against evil-seeming states. Retributiveness should heighten support for punitive uses of military force, satisfaction from punitive wars, and threats perceived from transgressor states, while humanitarianism should have the opposite effects. Using death penalty support as a proxy measure for these values, public opinion about the 1991 and 2003 Persian Gulf wars provides evidence for a moral-punitiveness effect. Death penalty supporters were significantly more hawkish than death penalty opponents in both cases, controlling for ideology, utilitarian logic, and other potential confounders. These findings explain why foreign villains and good-versus-evil framing heighten public support for war.Earlier versions of this article were delivered at the 2003 and 2005 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association. I am grateful to Kurt Gaubatz, Daniel Geller, Paul Goren, Jon Hurwitz, Keena Lipsitz, Shoon Murray, Felicia Pratto, and International Organization's reviewers for comments on earlier drafts. Craig Enders, Keith Markus, and Cornell University Peace Studies Seminar participants gave me helpful suggestions, and Linda Skitka shared useful unpublished findings. This study benefited from a PSC-CUNY grant from the City University of New York, and Ahuva Spitz's able research assistance.

A substantial body of research suggests that the United States has a distinctive legal style characterized by detailed rules, extensive transparency requirements, adversarial procedures for dispute resolution, costly legal contestation involving many lawyers, and frequent judicial intervention in administrative affairs. Recently, scholars of comparative law and public policy have asked whether this American legal style is spreading around the world. Some scholars have argued that legal styles are converging on an American model, while others have argued that distinctive national legal styles will persist. This article addresses this emerging debate. We argue that American legal style is spreading to other jurisdictions. However, we depart from predominant explanations, which attribute convergence to international regulatory competition or emulation. Instead, we argue that economic liberalization and political fragmentation have undermined traditional approaches to regulation and have generated functional pressures and political incentives to shift toward American legal style.The authors thank Kenneth Abbott, Ward Bower, Kent Calder, Robert G. DeLaMater, Tom Ginsburg, Jack Goldsmith, Milton Heumann, Mark D. Hunsaker, Nicolas Jabko, Robert Kagan, Susan Lawrence, Kathleen McNamara, Michael Paris, Mark Ramseyer, Amy Searight, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Tatsushi Terada, David Vogel, Albert Yoon, and participants in presentations at the 2001 International Studies Association Convention, the 2001 American Political Science Association Convention, Northwestern University's Center for International and Comparative Studies, the University of Chicago Law School, and Princeton University's Center of International Studies for their comments on earlier versions of the article. The authors thank Rachael Snyder, Fatima Khan, Hisako Yamamoto, Masako Ishiwata, and Kei Yamaguchi for their research assistance and Akiko Tsuda, Akemi Ideuchi, and Mio Kato for secretarial assistance. Kelemen thanks the Frank Kneller Fund at Rutgers University and the Center of International Studies at Princeton University for financial support. Views expressed herein are those of the authors alone and are not necessarily those of any institutions with which they are affiliated.

At some point during 1991–92, something substantial changed in the way Israel's security agencies interrogated Palestinian detainees. The change was not in the number of detainees interrogated; on any given day in 1993, some four hundred to six hundred Palestinians continued to be interrogated by either the General Security Services (GSS) or the military (Israel Defense Forces; IDF). Overall, Israel interrogated some five thousand Palestinians every year from 1988 to 1994. Nor was the change one of interrogation results: the conviction rate of Palestinians in the military courts remained above 96 percent, with most convictions based on confessions obtained during interrogation. According to official statistics, of the 83,321 Palestinians tried in military courts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between 1988 and 1993, only 2,731, or 3.2 percent, were acquitted. The security forces were still questioning a remarkable proportion of the adult male population, obtaining vast amounts of information on Palestinian social, political, and military activities.

Three assertions about relations between multinational corporations and host countries in the Third World frequently appear in the dependencia literature: 1) that the host countries receive too few benefits; 2) that foreign investment causes distortions in the local economies; and 3) that foreign investment distorts host countries' political processes. These propositions can be reformulated as testable hypotheses, to which non-dependency studies of oligopolistic competition, bureaucratic politics, and transnational relations are relevant. Identifying critical areas of disagreement between dependency and nondependency approaches may help scholars to design their research in such a way as to enrich the dialogue between dependentistas and non-dependentistas.

The treatment of foreign investment has become the most controversial issue in global governance. At the center of the controversy lies the mechanism of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), which allows private firms legal recourse against governments if government interference has degraded their investment. Using newly released data covering 742 investment disputes, I assess some of the central claims about ISDS. I argue that the regime has indeed undergone an important shift: a majority of claims today deal not with direct takings by low-rule-of-law countries, but with regulation in democratic states. Such “indirect expropriation” claims have seen a precipitous decrease in their odds of legal success over the past twenty years. They are also far less likely to result in early settlement. These parallel trends may be a result of a rise in strategic litigation by investors whose aim is not only to obtain compensation but also to deter governments' regulatory ambitions.

The “new” trade theory and standard trade theory make different predictions about the composition and distribution of trade flows. Empirical evidence suggests that an increasing share of international trade consists of differentiated products, a consequence of increasing returns to scale. Nonetheless, the existing political science literature typically assumes that the conditions of standard theory hold. As such, the literature ignores the dynamic-inconsistency problem that imperfect markets can create. In doing so, it also ignores the fact that imperfect markets can shift the political prerequisites of open international markets. In this article we examine these shifts. We argue that alliances can support an optimal level of trade when scale economies rather than differences in relative factor endowments motivate it. Our empirical results support this argument, indicating that alliances exert a stronger influence on trade in goods produced under conditions of increasing rather than constant returns to scale.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston; the 2002 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New Orleans; and seminars at the University of Chicago (PIPES), the University of Colorado, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. For helpful comments and suggestions, we are grateful to participants in these seminars and to Regina Baker, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, William Clark, Benjamin Cohen, Christina Davis, Eric Fisher, Avery Goldstein, Stephen Kobrin, Lisa Martin, Patrick McDonald, Helen Milner, Robert Powell, Dan Reiter, Anne Sartori, Branislav Slantchev, and Beth Yarbrough. We are also grateful to Regina Baker and Patrick McDonald for research assistance.

Barbara Koremenos, Charles Lipson, and Duncan Snidal conjecture that the conditions of membership in international institutions will grow more restrictive as a response to uncertainty about state preferences. Membership criteria will act as a signaling device—states more committed to cooperation will be willing to meet the criteria, whereas those less committed to cooperation will not. The recent enlargement of NATO to include the former Warsaw Pact members Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic illustrates this logic. The potential candidates for admission had to meet standards with respect to democratization, civilian control over the military, and the resolution of border and ethnic disputes with neighbors. These criteria served to identify the more cooperative potential members and to encourage cooperative behavior among those who aspired to membership. However, NATO enlargement came at a price. Although trust was built and cooperation fostered between the East European states that gained membership, trust was broken and cooperation harmed between NATO and Russia. This unfortunate outcome represents a dilemma that arises in the expansion of a security community: While expanding the security community enlarges the zone of peace and mutual trust, it may generate fear among those still on the outside, who view it as a potentially hostile alliance. I present a game-theoretic analysis of this dilemma and analyze the conditions under which it arises.

Status has long been implicated as a critical value of states and leaders in international politics. However, decades of research on the link between status and conflict have yielded divergent findings, and little evidence of a causal relationship. I attempt to resolve this impasse by shifting the focus from status to relative status concerns in building a theory of status from the ground up, beginning with its behavioral microfoundations. I build on and extend previous work through an experimental study of status threats and the escalation of commitment, operationalized here as a new behavioral escalation task using real financial incentives and framed around a narrative of war and peace. I utilize a unique sample of high-profile political and military leaders from the Senior Executive Fellow (SEF) program at the Harvard Kennedy School, as well as a group of demographically matched control subjects, allowing me to evaluate the moderating effect of power on status concerns while also addressing typical concerns about external validity in IR experiments. I find strong evidence that the fear of losing status impedes decision making and increases the tendency to “throw good money after bad,” but that power aids decision making by buffering high-power subjects against the worst effects of status loss.

What accounts for the development of the Arab states system from the explosive mix of Arab nationalism and sovereignty to their simultaneous existence? To understand this development, one must first examine how institutions can shape the very interests and roles of states in such a manner as to encourage the development of relatively stable expectations and shared norms; that is, regional order. This approach illuminates how inter-Arab interactions and state formation processes led to the consolidation of sovereignty and a meaning of Arab nationalism that is consistent with sovereignty. Consequently, this region highlights how sovereignty—and its lack thereof—is consequential for understanding interstate dynamics, and how different meanings of the nation have different implications for security.

By the end of the medieval era, three new competing institutions attempted to capture gains from trade and reduce feudal particularism: sovereign territorial states, cityleagues, and city-states. By the middle of the seventeenth century, city-leagues and city-states had declined markedly. Territorial states survived as the dominant form because they were able to reduce free riding, lower transaction costs, and credibly commit their constituents. The selection process took place along three dimensions. First, sovereign territorial states proved competitively superior in the economic realm. Second, states increasingly recognized only other sovereign territorial states as legitimate actors in the international system. Third, other actors defected to or copied the institutional makeup of sovereign territorial organization. The emergence of discrete territorial units in which only sovereign authorities represented their citizens as the predominant type of organization in international affairs created a new solution to the problem of markets and hierarchies.

With the future of liberal internationalism in question, how will China's growing power and influence reshape world politics? We argue that views of the Liberal International Order (LIO) as integrative and resilient have been too optimistic for two reasons. First, China's ability to profit from within the system has shaken the domestic consensus in the United States on preserving the existing LIO. Second, features of Chinese Communist Party rule chafe against many of the fundamental principles of the LIO, but could coexist with a return to Westphalian principles and markets that are embedded in domestic systems of control. How, then, do authoritarian states like China pick and choose how to engage with key institutions and norms within the LIO? We propose a framework that highlights two domestic variables—centrality and heterogeneity—and their implications for China's international behavior. We illustrate the framework with examples from China's approach to climate change, trade and exchange rates, Internet governance, territorial sovereignty, arms control, and humanitarian intervention. Finally, we conclude by considering what alternative versions of international order might emerge as China's influence grows.

The international debt crisis has forced painful economic adjustments on the developing world. In the short run it has forced governments to seek to correct payments imbalances through stabilization programs, usually undertaken with conditional assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The crisis has also revealed deeper weaknesses in many Third World economies, weaknesses demanding more basic reforms in the structure of incentives, prices, and investment.