In this article, I refine and expand the agenda for research on monetary institutions. First, I evaluate the analyses and research designs presented in this special issue of International Organization. Out of this evaluation, several ideas about how to produce a “third generation” of research on this topic emerge. Specific ideas include how to: create a better synthesis with certain branches of economics, such as information economics; broaden the welfare criteria on which institutional choices are made; deepen the analyses of coalitional and other political processes on which the choice of institutions are based; and strengthen the tests that are offered in support of these choices.

In the second part of this article, I explore questions of how popular sovereignty over economic policy and institutional choice are achieved. I show that the institutional regimes proposed in the special issue are, in a sense, democratic as long as the public's “perceived consensus” about economic policies and macroeconomic outcomes is real. However, if, as new work suggests, there is genuine dissensus about policy and macroeconomic objectives, it is no longer clear that the regimes proposed in the special issue are democratic. In the conclusion, I briefly discuss a possible crisis of imagination in institutional design.

In late November 1978, Nicolae Ceausescu, general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, returned to Bucharest from a Moscow meeting of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO). In a series of speeches from 25 November through 1 December, he began to denounce efforts by the Soviet Union to integrate more fully the armies of the WTO members and to get the East European members to increase their defense expenditures. Ceausescu was making a dramatic (and apparently successful) appeal for domestic support for his resistance to Soviet pressure. Other WTO member-states, although less publicly, have also resisted this Soviet pressure. Romania is not the only East European state ignoring Soviet calls for higher defense spending. Poland, for example, has also shown a significant decline during the 1970s in the amount of its gross national product (GNP) spent on defense (D/GNP). East Germany, on the other hand, increased its expenditures dramatically over the same decade.

We develop a model of international negotiation in which states anticipate that the agreements they sign will only be partly implemented. The results differ significantly from theories of domestic ratification that have previously been applied to this problem. Negotiators do not try to satisfy the implementer and may even choose agreements that the implementer would explicitly reject in a ratification model. Partial implementation also makes it possible for two negotiators to reach agreements outside their usual win-set. This situation may allow one country to make extraordinary concessions, knowing that some provisions will never be fully implemented. We apply these claims to Sino-American negotiations over intellectual property rights, where implementation has been a recurrent issue. The theory enriches the theory of two-level games, which has focused much too narrowly on formal ratification without amendment as the canonical case of domestic influence over international bargaining.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago. We would like to thank Aslaug Asgeirsdottir, Brian Gaines, Lisa Martin, two anonymous referees, and attendees at the MPSA panel for their comments. Any errors remain our responsibility.

We thank Tamar Gutner for her thoughtful comments on our article, “Delegation to International Organizations: Agency Theory and World Bank Environmental Reform” (International Organization, Spring 2003). While championing principal-agent (P-A) theory as the most promising approach to the study of international organizations (IOs) in general, she questions the novelty of our P-A model and criticizes both our methods and data. We are grateful for the opportunity to clarify our contributions and offer concrete solutions to the research questions that she raises.We thank Brad Parks and Sue Peterson for comments on an early version of this article. For research assistance, we are grateful to Daniel Magleby, Dan Maliniak, and Jess Sloan.

One of the most important recent contributions to the field of comparative political economy is Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations. In that work, Olson deduces, from his logic of collective action, a series of implications regarding the impact of social organizations—in particular, “distributional coalitions”—on economic growth that can explain variations in national growth rates across a wide range of time and space. This article considers the assumptions upon which that logic is founded, the plausibility of the several implications drawn from that logic, and the application of the theory to account for differences among five nations in rates of economic growth in the post-World War II era. The analysis suggests that the characteristics of group activity emphasized by Olson represent, at best, only a small— perhaps negligible—part of the explanation of cross-national differences in growth. Instead, it suggests that an important source of the variation among nations in growth rates is the international political and economic system. In particular, the discussion of the German, Japanese, and British cases suggests that stagnation (or growth) is, to a considerable extent, the product of a nation's position in the world economy, the policy responses through which governments seek to perpetuate or improve that position, and the constraints upon (or opportunities for) growth-oriented domestic economic policy posed by that position.

Do peacekeepers protect civilians in civil conflict? Securing civilian safety is a key objective of contemporary peacekeeping missions, yet whether these efforts actually make a difference on the ground is widely debated in large part because of intractable endogeneity concerns and selection bias. To overcome these issues, we use an instrumental variables design, leveraging exogenous variation in the rotation of African members of the United Nations Security Council and looking at its effects on African civil wars. We show that states that wield more power send more peacekeepers to their preferred locations, and that these peacekeepers in turn help to protect civilians. We thus demonstrate the robustness of many existing results to a plausible identification strategy and present a method that can also be applied to other diverse settings in international relations.

One of the marked features of international relations in recent years has been the growth of regional groupings and organizations. Included among the more notable regional arrangements formed since 1944 are the League of Arab States, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, the Organization of American States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the European Coal and Steel Community. In addition to these and other existent arrangements are proposals for the creation of a European Defense Community and a European Political Community, the idea of a Pacific Pact resembling NATO, the concept of a Middle East Defense organization, and a possible linkage of Asian States.

The regime for payments financing embedded in the postwar Bretton Woods system was based on the principle, formally articulated in the Charter of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that nations should be assured of an adequate but not unlimited supply of supplementary financing for balance-of-payments purposes. Norms included the obligation to avoid policies inconsistent with the IMF Charter (i.e., to play by the agreed rules of the game). In the 1970s the regime seemingly underwent profound change, as the private credit markets emerged as an increasingly important rival to the IMF as a source of payments financing. Nonetheless, this change fell short of a transformation of kind, insofar as the Fund continues to play a role as informal certifier of creditworthiness in the markets. Rather, it represents an example of ‘norm-governed change.’ Despite greater ambiguity in rules and decision-making procedures, a strong element of continuity in basic principles and norms remains.

Program and organization were the most important questions discussed at the First Assembly of the World Health Organization, which was held in Geneva from June 24 to July 24, 1948. Dr. Andrija Stampar (Yugoslavia), who had been chairman of the Interim Commission, was elected president by acclamation. An Executive Board of eighteen members representing the following countries was chosen: Australia, Brazil, Byelorussia, Ceylon, China, Egypt, France, India, Iran, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Union of South Africa, USSR, United Kingdom, United States, and Yugoslavia. A system was adopted whereby the Board Members would draw by lot for the duration of their terms of office. Dr. Brock Chisholm (Canada) was elected Director-General of the organization, which had a membership of 52 countries.

Administration of assistance projects by international lending agencies has come under increasing criticism during the past decade, a period when development projects have become primary instruments of international investment and an important element of public administration in developing nations. As a result international assistance agencies drastically reorganized their lending procedures during the early 1970s, creating complex requirements for project planning, appraisal, and implementation. But the formal procedures have become so complex that they are now beyond the administrative capacity of most developing nations and, perhaps, of the assistance agencies themselves. Evaluation reports reveal serious gaps between prescribed procedures and actual behavior at each stage of the project cycle. International requirements for project planning and implementation not only impose on developing nations a set of “rational” procedures that are often unrelated to political, administrative, and cultural constraints, but the attempts of Third World countries to conform may be adverse to their own interests.

The rise of direct marketing of crude oil by state-owned enterprises from producer countries has added to the instability of world oil trade. The major cause of the rise of direct marketing was the changing structure of barriers to entry into the industry by new firms. Upstream, shifting entry barriers enabled state-owned enterprises increasingly to displace international companies; meanwhile, independents were increasing their share of refining capacity downstream. These changes contributed to the demise of traditional patterns of vertical integration. But these vertically integrated linkages had served to stabilize world oil trade, so their demise added to the turbulence of the international market. In response, both governments and firms from oil-importing countries have sought, with mixed success, to create new ties to sellers in order to stabilize the market.

I intended to assure France primacy in Western Europe by preventing the rise of a new Reich …; to cooperate with East and West and, if need be, contract the necessary alliances on one side or the other without accepting any kind of dependency; … to persuade the states along the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees to form a political, economic, and strategic bloc; to establish this organization as one of the three world powers and, should it be necessary, as the arbiter between the Soviet and Anglo-Saxon camps.

Karl Deutsch has argued that since the mid-1950's the structural, or institutional, political integration of Western Europe has come to a halt. What Deutsch means by the halt of political integration in Western Europe is the ending of any trend toward the development or the expansion of the authority of supranational institutions to make major policy decisions. Political decisions will continue to be made by sovereign nationstates and not by any supranational European institutions. Although institutional political integration is the central variable in his analysis, Deutsch reports no attempts to directly measure the decisionmaking capability of any Western European supranational institution. By accepting the validity of his sociocausal paradigm of political integration, which holds that political integration cannot occur until after a process of social assimilation creates a homogeneous transnational population, Deutsch contends that in order to describe the levels of political integration in Western Europe he need only examine data relating to the levels of social homogeneity which characterize that region. To measure the extent of social assimilation in Western Europe Deutsch examines the transaction flow rates of trade, mail, travel, migration, and student exchange data and studies the responses of mass and elite population samples to a complex series of survey questions. Deutsch's analysis of these varied data leads him to conclude that the levels of social assimilation in Western Europe have 1) remained constant for the past decade and 2) are too low to permit institutional political integration to occur.

This article examines the intraregional conflict management activities of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Three traditional regionalist claims are tested and suggestions concerning the future role of such organizations are provided. The findings indicate that in a number of cases the OAU was not an effective agent for conflict management; its limitations were clearest in internal disputes and those international conflicts involving allegations of subversion. Evidence from this study does not convincingly support the proposition that similarities of interests, problems, and loyalties found at the regional level make it more likely that attempts at settlement will be forthcoming and successful. Other findings indicate that the organization was able to isolate intra-regional conflicts from entanglement in more complex global disputes; this ability was, however, highly dependent on the desire of the great powers to remain uninvolved. The OAU was able to relieve the UN of the potential burden of numerous local conflicts, but this too sometimes proved dependent on policy decisions made by the United States or the Soviet Union. It is suggested that regional organizations may assist the superpowers in avoiding unwanted involvement in local disputes, but that unless the conflict management capacity of such organizations is increased, the result may be that many conflicts will remain unsettled.

Though substantively important, centralized negotiations have received less theoretical attention than problems of centralized monitoring and enforcement. I address this gap by examining variation in a particular form of centralized negotiations that I call “clustering.” Clustering occurs when a state negotiates with several other states at the same time. Clustering enables states to avoid having to make concessions on the same issue to one state after another, and therefore has important distributional advantages. Clustering also centralizes bargaining within a regime, especially when several states cluster simultaneously in a “macro-cluster.”

I propose several hypotheses about clustering. First, most-favored-nation (MFN) clauses are a necessary condition for clustering. They link the distributional conflicts among many pairs of countries and make centralized bargaining more likely. Second, increasing membership in the trade regime makes clustering more likely. This relationship between membership and centralization echoes Rational Design conjecture C3, centralization increases with number, though the causal mechanism differs significantly. Third, clustering provides distributional advantages to those who cluster. A state that clusters, such as France under the Méline tariff or Germany under Chancellors Leo von Caprivi and Bernard von Bülow, will make fewer concessions than one that does not.

The cross-border movement of people, goods, and information frequently results in legal disputes that come under the jurisdiction of multiple states. The principle of deference—acceptance of another state's exercise of legal authority—is one mechanism to manage such jurisdictional conflicts. Despite the importance of deference in international law and cooperation, little is known about the causes of variation in its use. In this article, we develop a theory of deference that focuses on the role that domestic institutions and norms play in ensuring procedural and substantive fairness. We test this theory in an original data set concerning accession practices in the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. Our findings offer considerable support for the idea that states evaluate partners on the likelihood that they can offer a fair legal process. Exploring empirically the efforts against parental child abduction, we offer a nuanced account of the link between domestic institutions and norms and international cooperation. This account suggests that greater attention should be paid to the use of deference as a mechanism to manage the conflicts posed by globalization.

Why did the United States intervene in World War I, breaking with its long tradition of noninvolvement in European political and military conflicts? During the 1920s and 1930s, many “revisionist” historians argued that American efforts to protect its trade with the Allies ultimately led to intervention. The logic of the revisionist position closely parallels the contemporary liberal case that interdependence promotes peace but arrives at different conclusions about the relationship between trade and conflict. Historians have largely abandoned this economic interpretation of American intervention, but data on the impact of the wartime export boom on the United States suggest that it should be reconsidered. The export boom was so large that it would have been difficult to ignore, and its progress corresponds to the timing of important decisions leading to American belligerency. An analysis of congressional voting on war-related measures also suggests that export income helped shape politicians' views of the war.I would like to thank Katherine Barbieri, John Coogan, David Clark, Jeffry Frieden, Jack Levy, Brian Lai, Timothy McKeown, David Painter, Strom Thacker, and participants in the world politics workshop at Binghamton University, the political economy workshop at Harvard University, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for their many comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article. Lisa Martin and several anonymous reviewers at International Organization also made many valuable suggestions. I am especially grateful to Thomas Walker, whose good-natured skepticism prompted me to write this paper. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Any remaining errors and misinterpretations are my responsibility.