This article questions the validity of anarchy as an assumption in International Relations theory. Powerful states often provide public goods to smaller states in return for their acquiescence on matters of interest. This transactional provision of public goods is analogous to how central governments behave in domestic environments; thus the hierarchic structure of domestic politics is replicated in international politics. The anarchy-hierarchy distinction, which rests on a neat separation of international and domestic structures, is therefore highly contentious. One public good that great powers provide, largely ignored by the literature on hierarchy, is justice. Powerful states can provide a forum for aggrieved parties to settle their disputes, and thus contain conflicts before they escalate to war. If such a forum is no longer provided, the system reverts to anarchy, where escalation—and therefore, war—is more likely. South America's war-prone decade can be explained by the variation in structural conditions on the continent. Due to the Depression, its Good Neighbor policy, and the onset of World War II, the United States was less interested in South American affairs in the 1930s, resulting in a more anarchic structure and a higher propensity for war.

Some treaties are signed and then ratified quickly while others languish in legal limbo, unratified by one or more parties. What explains this variation in the time between signature and ratification? The international relations literature has not taken the ratification stage seriously enough, despite its obvious importance from a legal and a political perspective. We offer a systematic study of this question in the context of bilateral investment treaties. We develop and test a set of theoretical propositions related to domestic-level constraints on the executive, the varying ability of governments to rationally anticipate ratification obstacles, and the bilateral relationship between treaty partners. We generally find support for these propositions but report some surprising findings as well. The article presents implications for investment agreements and treaty making more generally, and raises a number of issues for further study at the intersection of international politics and law.

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.

Scholars have long debated whether nuclear superiority or the balance of resolve shapes the probability of victory in nuclear crises, but they have not clearly articulated a mechanism linking superiority to victory, nor have they systematically analyzed the entire universe of empirical cases. Beginning from a nuclear brinkmanship theory framework, I develop a new theory of nuclear crisis outcomes, which links nuclear superiority to victory in nuclear crises precisely through its effect on the balance of resolve. Using a new data set on fifty-two nuclear crisis dyads, I show that states that enjoy nuclear superiority over their opponents are more likely to win nuclear crises. I also find some support for the idea that political stakes shape crisis outcomes. These findings hold even after controlling for conventional military capabilities and for selection into nuclear crises. This article presents a new theoretical explanation, and the first comprehensive empirical examination, of nuclear crisis outcomes.

A series of studies has shown that civil wars are caused not only by factors inside countries, but also by effects operating across state borders. Whereas a first wave of quantitative studies demonstrated that such effects make the “closed-polity” assumption untenable, more recently researchers have identified particular causal mechanisms driving conflict. Despite these recent advances, a central puzzle remains unresolved, namely why ethnic groups that at least in theory could count on support from large transborder ethnic kin (TEK) groups often have remained surprisingly peaceful, such as the stranded Russian populations in the “near abroad.” We propose a theoretical framework that extends the analysis from the primary dyad between the incumbent and the challenger group by adding a secondary dyad that pits the incumbent against the TEK group. We postulate a curvilinear effect of the TEK group's relative size on conflict onset. Using a new data set on transnational ethnic links, we find that that the risk of conflict increases within the middle range of the size spectrum, consistent with our main hypothesis. This means that large TEK groups have a conflict-dampening effect, provided that they control their own state. Excluded TEK groups, however, are not associated with lower conflict probabilities.

Face-to-face diplomacy has long been the lynchpin of international politics, yet it has largely been dismissed as irrelevant in theories of cooperation and conflict—as “cheap talk” because leaders have incentives to dissemble. However, diplomats and leaders have argued for years that there is often no substitute for personally meeting a counterpart to hash out an agreement. This article argues that face-to-face diplomacy provides a signaling mechanism that increases the likelihood of cooperation. Face-to-face meetings allow individuals to transmit information and empathize with each other, thereby reducing uncertainty, even when they have strong incentives to distrust the other. The human brain has discrete architecture and processes devoted to parsing others' intentions via cues in face-to-face interaction. These processes enable actors to directly access the intentions of others with a higher degree of certainty than economic and game-theoretic models of bargaining predict.

Quantitative studies of conflict analyze either civil or interstate war. While there may be observable differences between civil and interstate wars, theories of conflict focus on phenomena—such as information asymmetries, commitment problems, and issue divisibility—that should explain both conflicts within and between states. In analyses of conflict onset, duration, and outcome combining civil and interstate wars, we find most variables have similar effects on both “types” of war. We thus question whether there is any justification for separate study of war types.

Do nuclear weapons offer coercive advantages in international crisis bargaining? Almost seventy years into the nuclear age, we still lack a complete answer to this question. While scholars have devoted significant attention to questions about nuclear deterrence, we know comparatively little about whether nuclear weapons can help compel states to change their behavior. This study argues that, despite their extraordinary power, nuclear weapons are uniquely poor instruments of compellence. Compellent threats are more likely to be effective under two conditions: first, if a challenger can credibly threaten to seize the item in dispute; and second, if enacting the threat would entail few costs to the challenger. Nuclear weapons, however, meet neither of these conditions. They are neither useful tools of conquest nor low-cost tools of punishment. Using a new dataset of more than 200 militarized compellent threats from 1918 to 2001, we find strong support for our theory: compellent threats from nuclear states are no more likely to succeed, even after accounting for possible selection effects in the data. While nuclear weapons may carry coercive weight as instruments of deterrence, it appears that these effects do not extend to compellence.

Political scientists and economists have long been interested in the role of special interests in the policymaking process. In the past few years, a series of important new books have argued forcefully that the lobbying activities of economic actors have an important influence on the prospects for war and peace. All of these analyses claim that whether economic actors enhance or decrease the likelihood of conflict ultimately depends on the domestic political balance between economic actors who have a strong vested interest in pushing for peace versus those that do not. I advance two contrary arguments. At least among the advanced states, I posit there are no longer any economic actors who will be favorable toward war and who will lobby the government with this preference. All of the identified mechanisms that previously contributed to such lobbying in these states have been swept away with the end of colonialism and the rise of economic globalization. In particular, I show that the current structure of the global economy now makes it feasible for foreign direct investment to serve as an effective substitute for conquest in a way that was not possible in previous eras. My second argument concerns those economic actors in advanced states with a preference for peace. I posit that it has become unnecessary for them to directly lobby the government to avoid war on economic grounds because economic globalization—the accumulation of decisions by economic actors throughout the globe—now has sufficiently clear economic incentives for leaders.

How does international law affect state behavior? Existing models addressing this issue rest on individual preferences and voter behavior, yet these assumptions are rarely questioned. Do citizens truly react to their governments being taken to court over purported violations? I propose a novel approach to test the premise behind models of international treaty-making, using web-search data. Such data are widely used in epidemiology; in this article I claim that they are also well suited to applications in political economy. Web searches provide a unique proxy for a fundamental political activity that we otherwise have little sense of: information seeking. Information seeking by constituents can be usefully examined as an instance of political mobilization. Applying web-search data to international trade disputes, I provide evidence for the belief that US citizens are concerned about their country being branded a violator of international law, even when they have no direct material stake in the case at hand. This article constitutes a first attempt at utilizing web-search data to test the building blocks of political economy theory.

Research on mass opinion in international political economy overwhelmingly relies on survey data. This poses problems of external validity, especially for a frequently low-salience issue such as trade policy. To examine whether survey findings about attitudes toward economic openness apply outside of surveys, this note considers patterns of voting in the 2007 Costa Rican plebiscite about joining the Central American Free Trade Area. Several extant theories appear to explain voting patterns, but the results are less in line with traditional economic models based on locally important economic sectors.

We explore the impact of issue framing on individual attitudes toward international trade. Based on a survey experiment fielded in Argentina during 2007, which reproduces the setup of earlier studies in the United States, we show that individuals' position in the economy and their material concerns define the strength of their prior beliefs about international trade, and thereby mitigate their sensitivity to the new dimensions introduced in informational cues. Extending the analysis beyond the United States to a country with different skill endowments allows us to better explore the role of material and nonmaterial attributes on individual attitudes toward trade. We find that skill is a central predictor of support for openness. The effect is strongest for individuals in the service sector and in cities that cater to the producers of agricultural commodities. Our findings suggest that the pattern of support for economic integration reflects the predictions from recent literature in international economics that emphasizes trade's impact on the relative demand for skilled labor regardless of factor endowments. Our findings also amend recent empirical contributions that suggest socialization is the main factor explaining individual sensitivity to issue framing on trade preferences. We suggest that material conditions associated with income and price effects are crucial, both in shaping trade preferences and in affecting the malleability of attitudes to issue framing. Hence, our results provide a crucial contribution to our general understanding of the attributes shaping susceptibility to political framing in policy debates.

This article investigates the extent to which citation and publication patterns differ between men and women in the international relations (IR) literature. Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy project on peer-reviewed publications between 1980 and 2006, we show that women are systematically cited less than men after controlling for a large number of variables including year of publication, venue of publication, substantive focus, theoretical perspective, methodology, tenure status, and institutional affiliation. These results are robust to a variety of modeling choices. We then turn to network analysis to investigate the extent to which the gender of an article's author affects that article's relative centrality in the network of citations between papers in our sample. Articles authored by women are systematically less central than articles authored by men, all else equal. This is likely because (1) women tend to cite themselves less than men, and (2) men (who make up a disproportionate share of IR scholars) tend to cite men more than women. This is the first study in political science to reveal significant gender differences in citation patterns and is especially meaningful because citation counts are increasingly used as a key measure of research's quality and impact.