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.

Is it possible to integrate states into larger unions without the use of force? Should we think of a continuous “federalizing process” in which economic integration is a first step? Are there certain conditions under which economic integration of a group of nations automatically triggers political unity?

A substantial international relations literature addresses the various ways in which international actors, and the norms they promote, influence state behavior. But less attention has been paid to the influence these actors directly exert at the local level, despite the fact that many transnational campaigns promote norms for which individuals—not states—are the primary transgressors. If individuals behave as some states do, publicly embracing international norms only because they expect a financial or reputational benefit from doing so, then the campaigns have not fully succeeded. But when do individuals engage in real behavior change, and when do they simply change the public image they present to the international community? To begin to address this question, I employ a randomized field experiment to evaluate individuals' willingness to make claims that differ from their true normative commitments. I conducted the experiment in the context of an original 2008 opinion survey about female genital mutilation and early marriage, run in rural Kenya. I find that respondents misrepresent their behavior and intentions, and I supplement these findings with an exploration of causal mechanisms through qualitative interviews.

In this article I revisit the relationship between war and state making in modern times by focusing on two prominent types of war finance: taxes and foreign loans. Financing war with tax money enhances the capacity to assess wealth and monitor compliance, namely fiscal capacity. Tax-financed war facilitates the adoption of power-sharing institutions, which transform taxation into a non-zero-sum game, carrying on the effect of war in the long run. Financing war with external capital does not contribute to long-term fiscal capacity if borrowers interrupt debt service and, as part of the default settlement, war debt is condoned or exchanged for nontax revenue. The empirical evidence draws from war around the world as early as 1816. Results suggest that globalization of capital markets in the nineteenth century undermined the association between war, state making, and political reform.

A wave of recent research challenges the role of regime type in international relations. One striking takeaway is that democratic and autocratic leaders can often achieve similar levels of domestic constraint, which in many issue areas results in similar international outcomes—leading many to question traditional views of democracies as distinctive in their international relations. In this review essay, we use recent contributions in the field to build what we call a “malleable constraints” framework, in which all governments have an institutionally defined default level of domestic audience constraint that is generally higher in democracies, but leaders maintain some agency within these institutions and can strategically increase their exposure to or insulation from this constraint. Using this framework, we argue that regime type is still a crucial differentiator in international affairs even if, as recent studies suggest, democratic and autocratic leaders can sometimes be similarly constrained by domestic audiences and thus achieve similar international outcomes. This framework helps reconcile many competing claims in recent scholarship, including the puzzle of why autocracies do not strategically increase domestic audience constraint more often. Just because autocracies can engage audience constraints and democracies can escape them does not mean that they can do so with equal ease, frequency, or risk.

Basic analytic premises are an issue in contemporary debates about the U.S. foreign economic policy process. In dispute are the power structures alleged to govern the formation of American trade and international monetary policy. Thus, the literature supports both of these assumptions: the distribution of power is skewed towards private actors in the issue-area generally; the distribution of power varies according to issue-area. Within the camp of issue-specific power structures, as I shall discuss in more detail, support can be found for almost any assumption about the distribution of power prevailing, in the language of current debate, between “state and society.”

The rise of top-heavy inequality—earnings concentration in a very thin layer of elites—calls into question our understanding of the distributional effects of the Liberal International Order. Far more people lose from globalization, and fewer gain, than traditional economic models suggest. We review three modern trade theories (neo-Heckscher-Ohlin-Stolper-Samuelson or H-O-S-S, new new trade theory, and economic geography) that each arrive at the conclusion of top-heavy inequality by introducing some form of unit heterogeneity—an assumption that the actors we once treated as identical actually differ from one another in important ways. Heterogeneity allows the gains from globalization to concentrate in a narrow segment of workers with superlative talents, extraordinarily productive firms, or heavily agglomerated cities. An analysis of European voting data shows that shocks from trade and migration elicit populist opposition only where the top 1 percent have gained the most. With few politically feasible alternatives to protectionism, most notably the failure of democracies to redistribute income, our analysis predicts a persistence of public support for antiglobalization parties, especially those on the Right.

This article investigates the politics of sovereign borrowing in Europe over the very long run. I consider three alternative hypotheses regarding the sources of borrower credibility. According to the first, European states with constitutional checks on executive authority found it easier to obtain credit at low interest rates than did states that lacked such constraints. My second hypothesis focuses on state type (city-state versus territorial state) and the way in which this may have influenced the balance of political power between owners of land and owners of capital in a society. This hypothesis suggests that after controlling for other factors, one should observe that city-states in Europe found it easier to borrow than did larger territorial states, and that these city-states paid lower interest rates on their debt. Finally, my third hypothesis suggests that borrower credibility depended on the simultaneous presence of both constitutional checks and balances and a city-state. When one considers a broad sample of cases over a long time span there is strong support for the proposition involving city-states and merchant power, but less support for the argument that constitutional checks influenced credibility regardless of state type (city-state or territorial state). There is, however, some empirical evidence of an interaction effect whereby constitutional constraints on rulers made city-states particularly credible as borrowers. My results are robust to a number of controls for alternative determinants, for sample selection bias, and for the endogeneity of city-state development.I would like to thank Robert Fannion, Jeff Frieden, Peter Gourevitch, Lisa Martin, Adam Przeworski, Ronald Rogowski, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Ken Scheve, Mike Tomz, Nikki Velasco, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at Stanford and UCLA for comments on a previous draft. This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK).

Although international relations scholarship emphasizing the role of social constructs such as norms and culture has established a beachhead in the area of security studies, it has yet to take on another bastion of the rational materialist approach: studies of coercive international bargaining. Scholarship in this area, ranging from the work of Thomas Schelling to James Fearon, has long argued that bargaining outcomes reflect the material costs and benefits faced by participants in negotiations. Participants can influence outcomes, these models assume, only through tactics such as credible threats and side payments that reshape the material context of negotiations.

The European Middle Ages have recently attracted the attention of international relations (IR) scholars as a “testing-ground” for established IR theories. Neorealists, historicizing neorealists, and constructivists dispute the meanings of medieval anarchy and hierarchy in the absence of sovereignty. On the basis of a detailed critique of these approaches, I offer a historically informed and theoretically controlled interpretation of medieval geopolitics revolving around contested social property relations. My interpretation is meta-theoretically guided by dialectical principles. Lordships are the constitutive units of medieval authority, combining economic and political powers and assigning contradictory forms of rationality to their major agents, lords, and peasants. Interlordly competition over land and labor translates directly into distinct forms of geopolitical relations, generating a culture of war. Against this background, I clarify the specific meanings of the medieval “state,” territoriality, frontiers, peace, war, anarchy, and hierarchy before drawing out the wider implications of changing social property forms for IR theory.

The rapid growth of trust funds at multilateral development organizations has been widely neglected in the academic literature. We examine sovereign donors' choices among various trust fund options and contend that the choice among the different trust funds involves a fundamental trade-off: larger funds provide donors with “burden-sharing” benefits, but each donor can better assert its individual preferences in a fund with fewer other donors. The theoretical considerations yield testable hypotheses on a range of factors affecting this fundamental trade-off, most notably the area of the trust fund's intervention and donor countries' competing domestic interests. A large-N analysis of participation decisions of OECD/DAC donors in trust funds over the past decade mostly corroborates these hypotheses. In particular, ex ante preference alignment among donors as well as indicators for global activities and fragile states aid are robust determinants of participation in (large) multi-donor funds. In contrast, a donor tends to prefer a single-donor fund in areas where its national interests dominate.

Structural international theory has become largely a matter of elaborating “the effects of anarchy.” Simple hunter-gatherer band societies, however, perfectly fit the Waltzian model of anarchic orders but do not experience security dilemmas or warfare, pursue relative gains, or practice self-help balancing. They thus demonstrate that “the effects of anarchy,” where they exist, are not effects of anarchy—undermining mainstream structural international theory as it has been practiced for the past three decades. Starting over, I ask what one needs to differentiate how actors are arranged in three simple anarchic orders: forager band societies, Hobbesian states of nature, and great power states systems. The answer turns out to look nothing like the dominant tripartite (ordering principle, functional differentiation, distribution of capabilities) conception. Based on these cases, I present a multidimensional framework of the elements of social and political structures that dispenses with anarchy, is truly structural (in contrast to the independent-variable agent-centric models of Waltz and Wendt), and highlights complexity, diversity, and regular change in the structures of international systems.

The European Common Market and forty odd African, Caribbean, and Pacific States (ACP) signed a trade and aid Convention in February 1975. The negotiations leading to the Lome Convention and the provisions of the Lomé Convention constitute an instructive vehicle for an examination of North-South bargaining. The organization, tenacity, and skill of the ACP states, as well as some re-thinking regarding their own situation on the part of European states produced some innovative and groundbreaking moves toward more equitable trade and aid relations. But even the most innovative components of the Lome Convention, STAB EX, sugar indexing and focus on industrial development, are perhaps less significant for their short-term economic effects than they are for a general understanding regarding the structure of North-South relations.

An analysis of a small sample of countries shows that the higher the level of termsof-trade risk that a nation faces in international markets, the more likely it is to increase barriers. The analysis also shows that the greater the availability of social insurance programs mounted by a nation's government, the less likely it is to block free trade. In comparison with the small open economies of Western Europe, therefore, developing countries may remain protectionist because they lack the resources to mount internal programs of transfer payments as a means of coping with risk from international markets.

Scholars focusing on international relations generally or foreign policy decision making are now paying increasing attention to the ways in which mental constructs—ideas, beliefs, ideologies, or worldviews—affect political actors' perceptions and behavior. The influence of mental constructs in political interaction is particularly visible when actors are trying to extend interaction into new areas or to establish new modes of cooperation. This study will illuminate the impact of mental constructs in these situations by examining the development of outer space law. The Soviets' successful launch of Sputnik in October 1957 shifted outer space from the realm of science fiction and speculation to the realm of real international concerns. Governments were faced with the problem of determining not only what they wanted to do in space but also what sorts of rules for unilateral activity and mutual interaction should prevail there.

Weapons production is increasing in the Third World, affecting the structure of the world arms transfer system. The quantitative and qualitative capabilities of Third World industries imply that the number of less developed countries (LDCs) producing major weapons will not increase dramatically in the future; that LDC defense production will remain a small fraction of the world's arms trade; and that military industries in the Third World will concentrate on defense items that are older and less complicated than technologies manufactured in the developed world. Various socioeconomic factors might explain the reasons for the disparities among arms producers. Factors of scale, particularly the existence of a large military to provide an adequate internal market, combined with financial resources and technically trained personnel to support the necessary industrial infrastructure, determine a state's comparative military-industrial capabilities. The inherent constraints of size and infrastructure will create a hierarchically stru tured world arms trade and production system as the military industries of states grow.

Three-and-a-half decades have passed since the energy of the atom was used in warfare. Yet rather than nuclear doom, the world has seen a surprising nuclear stability thus far. Equally remarkable is the fact that over the same period nuclear technology has spread to more than two score nations, yet only a small fraction have chosen to develop nuclear weaponry. A third notable point has been the development of an international nonproliferation regime—a set of rules, norms, and institutions, which haltingly and albeit imperfectly, has discouraged the proliferation of nuclear weapons capability.

The wrong policies in the 1980s—i.e., policies that put the United States in an overly rigid position on the nuclear fuel cycle or which lower the priority the United States gives to the issue in security terms—could still sacrifice the current modest success in regime maintenance. Unfortunately, there is no simple solution to the political problem of proliferation. But given the difficulty of constructing international institutions in a world of sovereign states, and the risks attendant upon their collapse, political wisdom begins with efforts to maintain the existing regime with its presumption against proliferation.

International institutions help governments make credible commitments to other state and nonstate actors by raising the costs of commitment violation. However, in doing so these institutions generate sovereignty costs for national governments by constraining the autonomy they have to develop and implement policy. Governments respond to this trade-off between the credibility of commitments and policy autonomy differently depending on their time horizons and this shapes their preferences over the design of credibility-enhancing institutions. Governments with long time horizons expect to govern in the future, anticipate that conditions may shift over time, and therefore seek institutional designs that will afford them greater freedom to modify policies in response to changing economic and political conditions. Governments with shorter time horizons, on the other hand, do not anticipate being in power long into the future and therefore are less concerned about maintaining greater room to manipulate policy. I develop this argument in the context of bilateral investment treaties (BITs), focusing in particular on the legalization of obligation in national treatment commitments. I test the argument using an original data set of the design of national treatment obligations in a random sample of 342 BITs. I find that net importers of FDI with longer time horizons are more likely to build in greater policy autonomy in their BITs by scaling back the legalization of their national treatment obligations and that this relationship is robust to controlling for selection into investment treaties.