Traditional accounts of U.S. tariff policy emphasize trade strategies and interest group politics. This article makes a departure. It opens with an observation: up until World War I, the tariff was the largest single source of federal government revenues. It then explores the significance of tariffs as taxes, theoretically and empirically.

In its first part, the article develops a theory of taxation politics and applies it to the tariff. In its second part, it submits the theory to an empirical test, modeling changes in U.S. tariff rates from 1829 to 1940. The politics of tariff revision, it argues, followed from two characteristics of the tariff as tax: from the extent of the treasury's dependence upon it and from the distributive pattern of its burdens and benefits. Taken together, the article concludes, revenue dependence and distributive incidence account for several diverse aspects of American tariff policy, including the structure of its coalitions, the shifts in its objectives, and the timing of its innovations.

Using a population-based survey experiment, this study evaluates the role of in-group favoritism in influencing American attitudes toward international trade. By systematically altering which countries gain or lose from a given trade policy (Americans and/or people in trading partner countries), we vary the role that in-group favoritism should play in influencing preferences.

Our results provide evidence of two distinct forms of in-group favoritism. The first, and least surprising, is that Americans value the well-being of other Americans more than that of people outside their own country. Rather than maximize total gains, Americans choose policies that maximize in-group well-being. This tendency is exacerbated by a sense of national superiority; Americans favor their national in-group to a greater extent if they perceive Americans to be more deserving.

Second, high levels of perceived intergroup competition lead some Americans to prefer trade policies that benefit the in-group and hurt the out-group over policies that help both their own country and the trading partner country. For a policy to elicit support, it is important not only that the US benefits, but also that the trading partner country loses so that the US achieves a greater relative advantage. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding bipartisan public opposition to trade.

The significance of the European Communities (EC) remains obscure. The reason is that orthodox integration literature is fundamentally ahistorical: it fails to give an adequate account of the roots of modern European integration. And however admirable the project might be in itself, we cannot rectify the failure simply by chronicling the admittedly much ignored origins of the EC in the 1950s. For the EC is systematically connected to earlier cases of integration in Europe. Only by understanding the evolution of these integrational forms—from early modern Britain, to nineteenth century Germany, to contemporary Europe—can one begin to make sense of the EC. In brief, one must seek to understand the “present as history,” a task that few writers on regional integration have yet attempted, and none with any success.

More than 3,000 international investment agreements (IIAs) provide foreign investors with substantive protections in host states and access to binding investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). In recent years, states increasingly have sought to change their treaty commitments through the practices of renegotiation and termination, so far affecting about 300 IIAs. The received wisdom is that this development reflects a “backlash” against the regime and an attempt by governments to reclaim sovereignty, consistent with broader antiglobalization trends. Using new data on the degree to which IIA provisions restrict state regulatory space (SRS), we provide the first systematic investigation into the effect of ISDS experiences on state decisions to adjust their treaties. The empirical analysis indicates that exposure to investment claims leads either to the renegotiation of IIAs in the direction of greater SRS or to their termination. This effect varies, however, with the nature of involvement in ISDS and with respect to different treaty provisions.

This article examines how European Union member states make choices about political institutions at intergovernmental conferences, the grand negotiations where many key institutional changes are made. Using data on member-state preferences from the intergovernmental conference leading to the Treaty of Amsterdam, I test competing bargaining theories, institutionalism, and intergovernmentalism, and present strong evidence that institutionalism better captures negotiations compared to intergovernmentalism. I present a formal model to discern between these competing theories of bargaining power, derive a statistical model directly from this formal model, and then use data from the European Union's Treaty of Amsterdam to test these theories and corresponding power sources. Veto power associated with institutional models better explains intergovernmental conference outcomes compared to power from size and economic might, often associated with intergovernmental analyses.I would like to thank Kathy Bawn, Julia Gray, Tim Groseclose, James Honaker, Joe Jupille, Thomas König, Jeff Lewis, Sven-Oliver Proksch, George Tsebelis, and the participants in UCLA's graduate student formal theory and statistical methods workshops for their insightful comments on various drafts of this article. I am also grateful for the comments from several anonymous reviewers and the editors at International Organization. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 2006. Data and replication material are available at 〈http://faculty.unlv.edu/jslapin〉.

Current attempts to understand and remedy the underdevelopment and peripheral international roles of Third World states derive from three competing paradigms: conventional social science, Marxism, and dependency theory. Each paradigm claims to explain past history and to make relevant policy recommendations for Third World leaders. Yet, none of these approaches has so far been formulated as complex, well specified, causal models. One can build theory relevant to data by specifying competing three-variable models relating economic dependency to economic performance and development potential. An empirical evaluation can then be made of the dependency theory proposition that economic dependency inhibits positive economic performance (growth and development). Partial correlation and regression analyses of economic data from thirty tropical African states in the middle and late 1960s provide little support for two dependency-based models and evidence in favor of conventional and Marxist models. These findings have implications for theory, further research, and policy.

Do legal amnesties for combatants help end civil wars? International policy experts often take it for granted that amnesties promote negotiated settlements with rebels. However, a large number of amnesties are followed by continued fighting or a return to the battlefield. What, then, are the factors that make amnesties effective or ineffective? In this article I use a disaggregated data set of all amnesties enacted in the context of internal war since 1946 to evaluate a bargaining theory of amnesties and peace. Testing hypotheses about conflict patterns using models that account for selection, I find that (1) only amnesties passed following conflict termination help resolve civil wars, (2) amnesties are more effective when they are embedded in peace agreements, and (3) amnesties that grant immunity for serious rights violations have no observable pacifying effects. These policy-relevant findings represent a new breakthrough in an ossified “peace versus justice” debate pitting security specialists against global human rights advocates.

Why do some countries fail to govern their territory? Incomplete domestic sovereignty, defined as the absence of effective state authority over territory, has severe consequences in terms of security, order, economic growth, and human well-being. These negative consequences raise the question of why such spaces remain without effective authority. While the international relations literature suggests that state weakness persists because of an absence of war and the comparative politics literature treats political underdevelopment as the consequence of domestic factors that raise the costs of exercising authority, these views are incomplete. I argue that hostile neighbors weaken state authority over territory through a strategy of foreign interference. Foreign interference in domestic sovereignty is a powerful instrument of statecraft that can yield domestic and foreign policy benefits. I investigate the effects of hostile neighboring states through a cross-national, within-country statistical analysis utilizing a novel indicator of state authority, and pair this analysis with a qualitative case study of Malaysian subversion of the Philippines in the 1970s. Together, this evidence shows how this international factor is an underappreciated yet important contributor to weak state authority even after accounting for domestic factors. The study's conclusions challenge our understanding of the effects of international politics on internal political development.

War is expensive—troops must be equipped and weapons must be procured. When the enormous borrowing requirements of war make the sovereigns' credibility problem more difficult, central banks enhance a government's ability to borrow. By being the sole direct purchaser of government debt, the central bank increases the effective punishment that can be imposed on the government for defaulting on the marginal lender. This increases lenders' confidence that the government will be punished in case of default, making lenders willing to purchase the debt at a lower rate of interest. The sovereign, dependent on the low borrowing costs offered by the central bank, has an incentive to retain the bank. Data covering the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal that possessing a central bank lowers the sovereign's borrowing costs, particularly during times of war.

Recent studies on global performance indicators (GPIs) reveal the distinct power that nonstate actors can accrue and exercise in world politics. How and when does this happen? Using a mixed-methods approach, we examine the impact of the Aid Transparency Index (ATI), an annual rating and rankings index produced by the small UK-based NGO Publish What You Fund. The ATI seeks to shape development aid donors' behavior with respect to their transparency—the quality and kind of information they publicly disclose. To investigate the ATI's effect, we construct an original panel data set of donor transparency performance before and after ATI inclusion (2006–2013) to test whether (and which) donors alter their behavior in response to inclusion in the ATI. To further probe the causal mechanisms that explain variations in donor behavior we use qualitative research, including over 150 key informant interviews conducted between 2010 and 2017. Our analysis uncovers the conditions under which the ATI influences powerful aid donors. Our mixed-methods evidence reveals how this happens. Consistent with Kelley and Simmons's central argument that GPIs exercise influence via social pressure, we find that the ATI shapes donor behavior primarily via direct effects on elites: the diffusion of professional norms, organizational learning, and peer pressure.

Bilateral defense cooperation agreements, or DCAs, are now the most common form of institutionalized defense cooperation. These formal agreements establish broad defense-oriented legal frameworks between signatories, facilitating cooperation in such fundamental areas as defense policy coordination, research and development, joint military exercises, education and training, arms procurement, and exchange of classified information. Although nearly a thousand DCAs are currently in force, with potentially wide-ranging impacts on national and international security outcomes, DCAs have been largely ignored by scholars. Why have DCAs proliferated? I develop a theory that integrates cooperation theory with insights from social network analysis. Shifts in the global security environment since the 1980s have fueled demand for DCAs. States use DCAs to modernize their militaries, respond to shared security threats, and establish security umbrellas with like-minded states. Yet, demand alone cannot explain DCA proliferation; to cooperate, governments must also overcome dilemmas of mistrust and distributional conflicts. I show that network influences increase the supply of DCAs by providing governments with information about the trustworthiness of partners and the risk of asymmetric distributions of gains. DCAs become easier to sign as more states sign them. I identify two specific network influences—preferential attachment and triadic closure—and show that these influences are largely responsible for the post-Cold War diffusion of DCAs. Novel empirical strategies further indicate that these influences derive from the proposed informational mechanism. States use the DCA ties of others to glean information about prospective defense partners, thus endogenously fueling further growth of the global DCA network.

Holy Land Crusades were among the most significant forms of military mobilization to occur during the medieval period. Crusader mobilization had important implications for European state formation. We find that areas with large numbers of Holy Land crusaders witnessed increased political stability and institutional development as well as greater urbanization associated with rising trade and capital accumulation, even after taking into account underlying levels of religiosity and economic development. Our findings contribute to a scholarly debate regarding when the essential elements of the modern state first began to appear. Although our causal mechanisms—which focus on the importance of war preparation and urban capital accumulation—resemble those emphasized by previous research, we date the point of critical transition to statehood centuries earlier, in line with scholars who emphasize the medieval origins of the modern state. We also point to one avenue by which the rise of Muslim military and political power may have affected European institutional development.

This paper highlights how international organizations can use global performance indicators (GPIs) to drive policy change through transnational market pressure. When international organizations are credible assessors of state policy, and when monitored countries compete for market resources, GPIs transmit information about country risk and stabilize market expectations. Under these conditions banks and investors may restrict access to capital in noncompliant states and incentivize increased compliance. I demonstrate this market-enforcement mechanism by analyzing the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an intergovernmental body that issues nonbinding recommendations to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism. The FATF's public listing of noncompliant jurisdictions has prompted international banks to move resources away from listed states and raised the costs of continued noncompliance, significantly increasing the number of states with laws criminalizing terrorist financing. This finding suggests a powerful pathway through which institutions influence domestic policy and highlights the power of GPIs in an age where information is a global currency.

In this article I investigate the apparent tension between liberal theories that highlight the foreign policy benefits of domestic accountability and the observation that the public tends to reflexively support a leader during an international crisis. Previous theories of the process by which the public rallies around their leader tend to highlight the emotional and automatic nature of citizens' responses to threats. Using a simple signaling model, I show that the political and operational circumstances that increase the probability of post hoc verification and punishment for privately motivated policy enhance the credibility of a leader's choices and transmit information on the benefits of action to the public. I derive several observable hypotheses from the informational model, linking the costliness of the signal, the presences of divided government, election years, active term limits, political insecurity, changes in freedom of information laws, and trust in government to the size of the rally in the United States. A battery of empirical tests offer strong support for the informational model and suggest that a public rally is a rational response to numerous international crisis circumstances. Observing a rally need not imply an emotional or irrational public.The author would like to thank Eric Chang, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Henk Goemans, Burt Monroe, Joachim Rennstich, Ken Bickers, Steve Chan, Tom Hammond, and Brian Silver for comments and constructive criticism. Three reviewers and the editorial staff at IO also deserve considerable thanks for contributing to the coherence of the article. As always, the remaining faults solely reflect the faults of the author.

The global expansion of the European state system suggests strong connections between political “life chances” and international status. Polities recognized as sovereign within the Western international community are much less likely than unrecognized polities to be colonized and are much less likely than dependencies to merge or dissolve. These variations in stability are difficult to understand through balance-of-power politics. They may be more plausibly explained through the institutional structure of the state system and, in particular, the organization of the system as a community of mutual recognition. Sovereign members of this community are treated in fundamentally different ways than are those seen as outside Western state society or as the dependent possessions of sovereign states.

This research note develops a new explanation of postwar peace duration: periods of peace following wars last longer when the war ends in foreign-imposed regime change. This study tests this hypothesis on a new data set (an expansion of Fortna's (2004) data) of all periods of peace following interstate war cease-fires, over the period 1914–2001. It also tests for other possible factors affecting postwar peace duration, including international institutions, the revelation of information during war, third-party intervention during war, postwar changes in the balance of power, regime type, past conflict history, and others. The article finds strong support for the central hypothesis that peace lasts longer following wars that end in foreign-imposed regime change. This pacifying effect diminishes over time when a puppet is imposed, but not when a democracy is imposed. There are other results, including that the strength of a cease-fire agreement has almost no impact on peace duration.

A prominent explanation of war claims that international conflict can result when shifts in bargaining power induce the declining power to behave aggressively today because the rising power cannot credibly commit to not behave aggressively tomorrow. This paper asks whether individuals respond to shifting power in ways assumed by these models. Rather than use abstract laboratory-based bargaining games as in other work, I use vignettes describing the United States in an international bargaining situation to explore the microfoundations of power transitions models empirically. The vignettes vary whether the individual is a member of a declining or a rising power and whether there are previous public commitments to the status quo division of territory. Subjects propose a response the United States should make and then explain their decision in their own words. I apply new methods for analyzing these open-ended responses. Consistent with predictions from the behavioral literature, I find important asymmetries in behavior across these conditions as well as substantial heterogeneities in individuals' motivations for their decisions. The results of the experiments suggest potential ways that power-transition models should be refined to have a firmer behavioral basis.

In the past few decades new laws criminalizing certain transnational activities have proliferated: from money laundering, corruption, and insider trading to trafficking in weapons and drugs. Human trafficking is one example. We argue that criminalization of trafficking in persons has diffused in large part because of the way the issue has been framed: primarily as a problem of organized crime rather than predominantly an egregious human rights abuse. Framing human trafficking as an organized crime practice empowers states to confront cross-border human movements viewed as potentially threatening. We show that the diffusion of criminalization is explained by road networks that reflect potential vulnerabilities to the diversion of transnational crime. We interpret our results as evidence of the importance of context and issue framing, which in turn affects perceptions of vulnerability to neighbors' policy choices. In doing so, we unify diffusion studies of liberalization with the spread of prohibition regimes to explain the globalization of aspects of criminal law.

Although there is a deep and wide consensus that international conflict over territory is especially common and destructive, there is less agreement over what it is about territory that leads to these outcomes. Understanding the role of territory in international conflict requires complementing realist and materialist understandings of the value of territory with one grounded in the constructivist theories that dominate studies of nationalism and geography. Doing so recognizes that homeland territoriality, because it raises the value of a specific territory and provides an imperative to establish sovereignty over it, plays a distinctive role in driving international conflict. This article presents a systematic, replicable operationalization of the homeland status of territory that, because it is consistent with constructivist theories of nationalism, can be used to integrate constructivist understandings of the role of territory into quantitative studies of territorial conflict. This measure is then used to test the implication that the loss of subjectively defined homeland territory increases the likelihood of international conflict relative to the loss of nonhomeland territory. The findings that dividing homelands is especially likely to lead to conflict are corroborated by a second novel measure of the homeland status of territory that is based on the identification of co-ethnics in a territory before the border was drawn.

In this article, we demonstrate that changes in the partisan orientation of a country's executive branch influence the likelihood that the government of that country complies with international legal commitments aimed at integration of capital markets. We argue that relative shifts in executive partisan orientation, whether toward the left or toward the right, represent important shifts in “national preferences” that have heretofore been absent from statistical models of treaty compliance. Using a matching estimator combined with a genetic algorithm to maximize balance in our sample, we show that the causal impact of a state signing Article VIII of the IMF Articles of Agreement is conditioned by right-to-left shifts in partisan orientation. The evidence indicates that such preference changes reduce the constraining effects of Article VIII but also indicates that Article VIII continues to exercise significant causal effects even in the face of relative shifts in executive partisan orientation.