Disciplinary learning & happy coincidences

After graduating from high school in Mequon, Wisconsin, I was convinced that I wanted to be a scientist. I went to Caltech, majoring in Biology. However, while there I ended up taking far more social science courses than were required as part of general education. I found that I especially enjoyed courses that fell in the intersection of politics/economics/history.

At the same time, I had wonderful research opportunities as part of my major. For example, Caltech offered (and continues to offer) a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship that gave me extensive lab experience and the opportunity to work independently and refine my research and presentation skills. I also had the privilege of working with Ray Owen, a star immunologist and skilled mentor (also an alumnus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and probably the nicest person I’ve ever met). I credit Ray with teaching me how to think in a disciplined, structured manner, and I fully expected to follow in his footsteps to pursue a research career in immunology. He helped me to land a job at Scripps Clinic in San Diego as a lab technician after my graduation, while I pondered the next step in my career.

Working at Scripps opened my eyes to an important fact: I did not want to spend the rest of my career working in a wet lab. I reflected on the social science courses that I had enjoyed and decided to try to get into a PhD program in political science with a focus on political economy and international relations. After I enrolled at Harvard, it turned out that Bob Keohane was planning to move to the Government Department there the year after I began the PhD program. Apparently, everyone else in my class was aware of this when they decided to go to Harvard, but being from a different disciplinary background, for me this was only a happy discovery.

Bob went on to become my mentor, as he was for so many others in international relations, including a truly impressive set of women who have gone on to be leaders in the profession. My dissertation committee consisted of Bob, who provided intellectual leadership in the study of international organizations; Gary King, who provided training and guidance in statistical methods; and Jim Alt, who provided expertise in political economy and formal methods. I truly managed to stumble into the best intellectual opportunity anyone in my generation could have asked for, and remain close with my mentors.

Research agendas

My research has revolved around the themes of global governance, international institutions, multilateralism, and international political economy. In graduate school, I was greatly impressed by Bob Keohane’s 1984 book After Hegemony, and related work on international regimes. At the same time, I had a long-standing interest in economic sanctions. I combined these interests in my dissertation, which eventually became the book Coercive Cooperation. The puzzle I asked was what factors contributed to multilateral cooperation on economic sanctions, which is often surprising because there are substantial profits to be made from refusing to go along with sanctions. I argued that international institutions provided the framework to support cooperation on sanctions, and further elaborated that the issue linkages created by institutions created the conditions for credible commitments to cooperate.

Over the next few years, I spun off smaller projects that explored the role of institutions in the process of European Monetary Unification; why powerful states might choose multilateralism as an institutional form, and how heterogeneous preferences created the potential for issue linkages to solve commons problems. Working with Judith Goldstein, we developed an argument about the limits of the strategy of legalization to promote trade liberalization; this article, published in 2000, on reflection has much to say about the current stasis of the World Trade Organization. With Liliana Botcheva, we developed an argument about how institutions might lead to either the convergence or divergence of state behavior, even if average behavior did not vary much.

My next major solo project shifted the focus to domestic institutions, with international cooperation still the main outcome of interest. In contrast to much of the existing literature, I argued that domestic legislatures that were active in foreign policy could actually enhance, rather than undermine, international commitments. I applied this argument to issues such as compliance with European Union directives and the provision of food aid in my 2000 book Democratic Commitments: Legislatures and International Cooperation and related journal articles.

Thinking about the role of legislatures in international cooperation led me to think, in particular, about the use of treaties versus executive agreements by the United States. Most studies at the time argued that the United States’ president used executive agreements as a mechanism to evade congressional opposition to proposed international cooperation. However, my work on legislatures and credible commitments led me to question this approach. If executive agreements are used to evade Congress, but Congress can nevertheless undermine cooperation if it is excluded from the process, why would other countries ever accept an executive agreement? I was able to find quantitative data that I believe effectively undermined the evasion argument.

In recent years I was privileged to work with David Lake and Thomas Risse to return to the themes of multilateralism and international institutions, co-editing the 75th anniversary issue of International Organization, after being lucky enough to have published an article, along with Beth Simmons, in the 50th anniversary issue. This issue explores challenges to the liberal international order from multiple perspectives, both internal and external. Although the postwar order has been deeply challenged before, for example during the OPEC oil crises, today challenges are coming from the major players in the order as their own democratic institutions are being threatened; while major outside threats such as the growth of China and climate change also eat away at the foundations of the liberal order. In my current work, I am continuing to focus on global governance issues, in particular the incidence and resolution of maritime border disputes (an issue of increasing importance as the Arctic opens up and China challenges the status quo in the South China Sea), and synthesizing arguments about the ways in which states control the activities of the International Monetary Fund.

Leadership opportunities

Looking over my professional career, I am struck by how much leadership experience I have gained through APSA. It began with being the International Collaboration Division Chair for the 1997 Annual Meeting. That led to being chair of various prize committees, the publications committee, and the program co-chair for the 2010 annual meeting along with Andrea Campbell. I then moved onto the Council and served as Secretary in 2012. I became Vice President in 2018-19, and am now thrilled to have the chance to serve as President.

I gained a great deal of leadership and professional experience serving on many journal editorial boards, as so many of us do. This experience culminated in being editor-in-chief of International Organization from 2002-2006, one of the best professional experiences of my life. I was also happy to work with Ed Mansfield to co-edit the Michigan Series in International Political Economy from 1994-2021.

At the level of my home institutions, much of my leadership experience came in the form of serving on and chairing what we would now call Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committees. At Harvard, in the aftermath of the scandal caused by President Larry Summers’ remarks on the mathematical capacities of women, I stepped into a newly created position of Senior Advisor to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, supporting the efforts of dean Bill Kirby until the conflict between him and Summers forced him to step down.

After moving to UW-Madison I intended to step away from administrative work at the university level. However, after serving on the Graduate Faculty Executive Committee, an opportunity arose to take the position of Associate Dean of Graduate Education. I have spent the last six years in that role and have recently stepped down to take on the APSA presidency. This gave me a tremendous viewpoint from which to learn about how all the different parts of the university work and gave me a great appreciation for what an incredible institution UW-Madison is, as a representative of a major public flagship research university.

“Looking over my professional career, I am struck by how much leadership experience I have gained through APSA.”

Colleagues

Throughout my career, I have been privileged to work with talented colleagues and students. These relationships are the best part of an academic career. I asked some colleagues and former students to share any thoughts about our work together and am happy to conclude by sharing some of these reflections.

To begin with a couple of former students: from Liliana Andonova, now at the Graduate Institute in Geneva: “I have felt that you have been a generous mentor, who has helped me to stay focused on developing new theoretical ideas and research that I enjoyed so very much. At the same time, I have also appreciated working with you, as a young, brilliant, and dynamic professor and later on as a colleague. I was fascinated (and still am) with institutional theory and your work has made such important contributions to that field. The article Institutional Effects on State Behaviour, which we developed and published together, develops institutional theory in the direction of creating a typology and identifying different conditions for the effects of institutions on state behaviour. Some of the factors that we have identified in that article, such as institutional design and interface with domestic politics, have been further explored in subsequent literature on international institutions. Finally, and significantly, both as a PhD student and colleague I have appreciated your support for many talented women in academia, and your tremendous service as a journal editor and as Advisor to the Dean and Dean.”

From Inken von Borzyskowski, now at University College London: “Lisa has shaped my PhD years (and beyond) in so many ways that it is challenging to capture in a few lines. Lisa and I arrived at UW Madison in the same year (2008), and her arrival was a score for UW and an amazing surprise and gift for me. I had the great privilege of being one of Lisa’s PhD students; I also served as her research assistant. As Lisa’s PhD student, I was in awe of her brilliant mind—how she could effortlessly provide simple solutions to seemingly intractable research problems in a few minutes that I had long tried to solve on my own. She was generous with her feedback on my writing, and her straight-forward way of evaluating my research has helped me improve my work and move more quickly through the stages of a dissertation. Through all of this, she was constantly kind, supportive, and encouraging. I am immensely grateful to have had her as my PhD advisor and continue to have her as a mentor and colleague.”

Next, from a few co-authors and colleagues: Peter Gourevitch writes, “Lisa joined us at the beginning of her career and we at UCSD were very pleased to snag her. She was smart and articulate. She did cutting-edge work in international political economy with a strong bent on how institutions influenced outcomes. Martin helped build strong connections between our newly created School of International Affairs (now called school of Global Policy and Strategy). She spoke easily to many different people. She and talked about co-authoring, got to a draft stage on a paper but it got caught up in the workload. We were sad to lose her, not surprised given her talent.”

Jeff Frieden says, “I suppose I could point to two endeavors, in addition to your having been a wonderful colleague for many years at Harvard. The first is your participation in a research and study group on the political economy of European integration that Barry Eichengreen and I ran at UC. You were a valued participant, and indeed contributed several excellent articles to several of the volumes that came out of that group, which I think of as having pioneered work on the subject. Your chapters in those volumes were among the first to bring serious institutional analysis to the study of European integration. In particular, your work on the impact of European (national) parliaments on the European Union more generally was extremely foresighted in identifying a crucial nexus between national and European politics. The second collaboration was on a very broad and ambitious survey of the state of the sub-discipline of IPE for the 2002 State of the Discipline publication. I just looked back at that essay, and I think it is fair to say that it was quite accurate in its evaluation of where the field then stood, and quite prescient in identifying topics that would need to be addressed more fully in the future.

“I was in awe of her brilliant mind—how she could effortlessly provide simple solutions to seemingly intractable research problems…”

From Thomas Risse, “Apart from you contributing to the Sage IR Handbook, we closely cooperated on two occasions: 1) I was associate editor of IO 2002-2006 when you were editor-in-chief, and 2) we co-edited the IO 75th anniversary issue on “Challenges to the Liberal International Order” (with David Lake). On both occasions, it was a sheer pleasure working with you, even though we came from very different backgrounds (yours was a rigorous IPE background, I had done security studies and human rights, both increasingly from a social constructivist perspective). During our time at IO, we almost always agreed when evaluating manuscripts, and when we didn’t, you were always open to being persuaded. And in the end, we had a consensus. Same with regard to the IO special issue! As to co-authoring the introductory article, we were each initially responsible for drafting particular sections. In the end, however, this was irrelevant, and—frankly—I do not remember who contributed what, since the introduction became our joint article.”

And finally, from Judy Goldstein, “Around the turn of the century, scholars began to question the assumption that in the post-Soviet world, international law would increase cooperation in a newly ‘liberal’ society of nations. Against this exuberant tide, Lisa offered a note of caution in a study that appeared in the journal International Organization (Summer 2000). Her argument was that legal precision can backfire: more rules can lead to less, and not more cooperation. Why was that? Precise rules create distributional clarity and thus encourage the mobilization of the ‘losers,’ undermining the ability of the organization to function. Instead, contracts, such as that found in the WTO, may be more successful when they are flexible and allow for the possibility of breach. Having the law legitimate ‘breach’, and under specifying just what constitutes that breach, she suggested, would encourage more long-term cooperation than a contract that is specific, transparent, and binding. Given the problems faced by the WTO in the ensuing decades, her cautionary note was prescient.”