EDITORS' NOTE
Editors' Note
- Emanuel Adler, Louis Pauly
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- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 25 January 2007, pp. 1-7
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With this issue, the editorial offices of International Organization (IO) move from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University in the United States to the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto in Canada. For the past five years, Lisa Martin has done an outstanding job in leading the journal to its current top-ranked position in the field. As editor-in-chief, Lisa was assisted not only by Rebecca Webb, an excellent managing editor, but also by two superb associate editors, Thomas Risse from the Free University in Berlin and Beth Yarbrough from Amherst College. We are grateful to them all for their hard work and dedication.
Research Article
Foreign Direct Investment and Income Inequality in Mexico, 1990–2000
- Nathan M. Jensen, Guillermo Rosas
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- 26 July 2007, pp. 467-487
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In this article we explore the relationship between the investments of multinational corporations (foreign direct investment) and income inequality in Mexico. We argue that Mexico's liberalization of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in the 1990s provides a natural experiment to test how FDI affects income inequality in a middle-income country. We use an instrumental variables approach as our identification strategy to mitigate problems of endogeneity and omitted variable bias. In an empirical test of the determinants of changes in income inequality from 1990 to 2000, we find that increased FDI inflows are associated with a decrease in income inequality within Mexico's thirty-two states.
The authors would like to thank Lawrence Broz, John Freeman, Matt Gabel, Geoff Garrett, Quan Li, Eddy Malesky, Layna Mosley, Katie Ridgeway, Pablo Pinto, John Stringer, and Andy Sobel for comments and suggestions. Jacob Gerber and Mariana Medina provided excellent research assistance. Thanks also to Patricio Aroca Gonzalez for generously providing us with his data. We acknowledge the financial support of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy. Nate Jensen's contribution to this article was written as a Global Fellow at UCLA's International Institute.
A Servant of Two Masters: Communication and the Selection of International Bureaucrats
- Leslie Johns
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- 11 April 2007, pp. 245-275
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International bureaucrats must often serve multiple principals who collectively choose policy. How does this affect bureaucrats' incentives to truthfully reveal their private information? I construct a cheap talk model in which a bureaucrat possesses private information about how policies translate into outcomes. The bureaucrat can communicate publicly observable messages about this information to two policymakers, who must then bargain over a set of policy choices. I find that both the bureaucrat's willingness to communicate informatively and the choice of an optimal bureaucrat are highly contingent on the bargaining powers of the two policymakers. When each policymaker is bound to adhere to the bargaining outcome, “moderate” bureaucrats are most preferred. In contrast, when at least one policymaker can leave the bargaining table and exercise an outside option, “biased” bureaucrats can be optimal. I illustrate my findings by examining UN weapons inspections in Iraq from 1991 to 2003.
I wish to thank Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Michael Gilligan, Catherine Hafer, Matias Iaryczower, Dimitri Landa, Adam Meirowitz, Alastair Smith, and the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Previous drafts of this article were presented in the New York University Politics Department Research Workshop and the 2006 Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association.
The Politics of International Judicial Appointments: Evidence from the European Court of Human Rights
- Erik Voeten
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- 04 October 2007, pp. 669-701
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Theories of government–international court relations assume that judges share an interest in expanding the reach of their court. Yet, casual observation suggests that international judges vary in their activist orientations and that governments selectively appoint judges. This article explores a new data set of dissents in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to estimate the ideal points of judges. The results show that activism-restraint is indeed the main dimension of contestation among judges. Variation in judicial activism cannot be accounted for by different legal cultures of judges or by levels of domestic human rights observance in the judges' countries of origins. Instead, aspiring European Union (EU) members and governments more favorably disposed toward European integration appoint more activist judges. These results imply that politics matters in the appointment of international judges and that EU expansion was an important driving force behind the ECHR's increased activism. More generally, the analysis suggests that agent selection is an important and understudied tool for influencing international organizations.
Earlier versions of this article were presented at seminars at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, George Washington, the University of Wisconsin, William and Mary, Princeton, and Georgetown as well as the 2006 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association. I much appreciate comments and suggestions from the participants in those seminars, two anonymous referees, Karen Alter, Freek Bruinsma, Rachel Cichowski, Allison Danner, Darren Hawkins, Larry Helfer, Christopher Joyner, Charles Lipson, Emily Meierding, Andrew Moravcsik, Kimberly Morgan, Eric Posner, Mike Tierney, and Andreas von Staden. I thank Jamie Druckman, Andrew Roberts, and Paul Warwick for making data on cabinet composition available.
Intergovernmental Organizations, Socialization, and Member-State Interest Convergence
- David H. Bearce, Stacy Bondanella
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- 04 October 2007, pp. 703-733
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This article explores the constructivists' institutional socialization hypothesis, positing that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) make member-state interests more similar over time, thus promoting interest convergence. We first show how this hypothesis can be tested systematically using relatively new data on dyadic interest similarity and joint structured IGO membership, and then we conduct a series of empirical tests. Our results show strong statistical support for the institutional socialization hypothesis, using both global and more restricted regional samples. We also demonstrate how our results are consistent with a longer-term socialization process and cannot be explained by the short-term effect of institutional information. Finally, we show some limits to the institutional socialization hypothesis. Unstructured IGOs reveal no effect in promoting member-state interest convergence. Following recent theory arguing that great powers in the international system often use IGOs for coercive means, we find that institutional socialization gets weaker as the power imbalance within the dyad grows.
Thanks to Chuck Boehmer, Heather Elko McKibben, Kate Floros, Erik Gartzke, Chuck Gochman, Michael Goodhart, Yoram Haftel, Volker Krause, Dan London, Andrew Long, Ed Mansfield, Lisa Martin, Tim Nordstrom, Zeki Sarigil, Meg Shannon, Dan Thomas, Lora Viola, Basak Yavcan, and two anonymous reviewers for data, comments, and/or helpful suggestions.
Cities, Constitutions, and Sovereign Borrowing in Europe, 1274–1785
- David Stasavage
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- 26 July 2007, pp. 489-525
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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).
Revisionism Reconsidered: Exports and American Intervention in World War I
- Benjamin O. Fordham
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- 11 April 2007, pp. 277-310
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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.
Politics and the Suboptimal Provision of Counterterror
- Ethan Bueno de Mesquita
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- 25 January 2007, pp. 9-36
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I present a model of interactions between voters, a government, and a terrorist organization. The model focuses on a previously unexplored conceptualization of counterterrorism as divided into tactic-specific observable and general unobservable tactics. When there is divergence between voters and government preferences, strategic substitution among different modes of attack by terrorists and agency problems between the voters and government create a situation in which the politically optimal counterterrorism strategy pursued by the government in response to electoral and institutional incentives is quite different from the security maximizing counterterrorism strategy. In particular, in response to electoral pressure, the government allocates resources to observable counterterror in excess of the social optimum. This problem is particularly severe when governments put great weight on rent-seeking or care less about counterterror than do voters and when terrorists have a large set of tactics from which to choose. Voters can decrease the magnitude of the agency problem by increasing the benefits of reelection by, for example, slackening requirements for nonsecurity related public goods.
I have received valuable comments and advice from Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Randy Calvert, Martin Cripps, James Fearon, Amanda Friedenberg, Robert Powell, Matthew Stephenson, and Barbara Walter. I thank the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University for financial support.
Institutional Determinants of Unemployment in OECD Countries: Does the Deregulatory View Hold Water?
- Lucio Baccaro, Diego Rei
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- 26 July 2007, pp. 527-569
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The view that unemployment is caused by labor market rigidities and should be addressed through systematic institutional deregulation has gained broad currency and has been embraced by national and international policymaking agencies alike. It is unclear, however, whether there really is robust empirical support for such conclusions. This article engages in an econometric analysis comparing several estimators and specifications. It does not find much robust evidence either of labor market institutions' direct effects on unemployment rate, or of a more indirect impact through the magnitude of adverse shocks. At the same time, we find little support for the opposite, proregulatory position as well: the estimates show a robust positive relationship between union density and unemployment rates; also, there is no robust evidence that the within-country variation of bargaining coordination is associated with lower unemployment (as frequently argued), nor is it clear that bargaining coordination moderates the impact of other institutions. All in all, restrictive monetary policies enacted from an independent central bank and other determinants of real interest rates appear to play a more important role in explaining unemployment than institutional factors.
Many thanks to participants in the 2d CofFEE Europe Workshop, as well as Peter Auer, Emilio Castilla, Rob Franzese, Andrew Glyn, Lane Kenworthy, Bernhard Kittel, Stephen Nickell, Michael Piore, Naren Prasad, and Marco Vivarelli for comments on previous versions of this article.
Institutions in International Relations: Understanding the Effects of the GATT and the WTO on World Trade
- Judith L. Goldstein, Douglas Rivers, Michael Tomz
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- 25 January 2007, pp. 37-67
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The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have been touted as premier examples of international institutions, but few studies have offered empirical proof. This article comprehensively evaluates the effects of the GATT/WTO and other trade agreements since World War II. Our analysis is organized around two factors: institutional standing and institutional embeddedness. We show that many countries had rights and obligations, or institutional standing, in the GATT/WTO even though they were not formal members of the agreement. We also expand the analysis to include a range of other commercial agreements that were embedded with the GATT/WTO. Using data on dyadic trade since 1946, we demonstrate that the GATT/WTO substantially increased trade for countries with institutional standing, and that other embedded agreements had similarly positive effects. Moreover, our evidence suggests that international trade agreements have complemented, rather than undercut, each other.
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 99th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, August 28–31, 2003. We thank Tim Büthe, Joanne Gowa, Miles Kahler, Andrew Rose, Arthur Stein, Richard Steinberg, and seminar participants at Stanford University, the University of Chicago (PIPES), the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Virginia, for many helpful comments. We especially thank Claire Adida, Ashley Conner, Moonhawk Kim, Erin Krampetz, James Morrison, Mike Nardis, Natan Sachs, Rachel Rubinfeld, and Jessica Weeks for excellent research assistance. We are grateful for financial support from the National Science Foundation (CAREER grant SES-0548285 to Tomz), the Stanford Center for International Development, and the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford.
A Case Study of the Construction of International Hierarchy: British Treaty-Making Against the Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century
- Edward Keene
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- 11 April 2007, pp. 311-339
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This article evaluates different theories of hierarchy in international relations through a case study of the treaty system that the British constructed in the early nineteenth century in an effort to abolish the slave trade. The treaty system was extraordinarily wide-ranging: it embraced European maritime powers, new republics in the Americas, Muslim rulers in northern and eastern Africa, and “Native Chiefs” on the western coast of Africa. It therefore allows for a comparative analysis of the various types of treaty that the British made, depending on the identity of their contracting partners. The article argues that a broadly constructivist approach provides the best explanation of why these variations emerged. Although British treaty-making was influenced by the relative strength or weakness of the states with which they were dealing, the decisive factor that shaped the treaty system was a new legal doctrine that had emerged in the late eighteenth century, which combined a positivist theory of the importance of treaties as a source of international law with a distinction between the “family of civilized nations” and “barbarous peoples.”
Some of the arguments in this article were presented to a seminar at the University of Chicago, and I am grateful to members of the Political Science Department there for several valuable constructive criticisms. I would also like to thank Duncan Bell, Molly Cochran, Steve Hopgood, Andy Hurrell, Katja Weber, and the journal's two anonymous readers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the article.
Overlapping Institutions, Forum Shopping, and Dispute Settlement in International Trade
- Marc L. Busch
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- 04 October 2007, pp. 735-761
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Preferential trade agreements offer members an alternative to dispute settlement at the World Trade Organization. This gives rise to forum shopping, in that complainants can file regionally, multilaterally, or not at all. What explains this choice of forum? I argue that complainants strategically discriminate among overlapping memberships: on a given measure(s), some prefer to set a precedent that bears only on a subset of their trade relations, others a precedent that bears on all their trade relations, while still others prefer not to set a precedent. Thus, the key to forum shopping is not simply which institution is likely to come closest to the complainant's ideal ruling against the defendant, but where the resulting precedent will be more useful in the future, enabling the complainant to bring litigation against other members, rather than helping other members bring litigation against the complainant. I consider disputes over Mexican brooms and Canadian periodicals.
For comments, I thank Vinod Aggarwal, Raj Bhala, Jane Bradley, Bill Davey, Rob Howse, Miles Kahler, Simon Lester, Rod Ludema, Ed Mansfield, Lisa Martin, Petros C. Mavroidis, John Odell, Joost Pauwelyn, Amy Porges, Eric Reinhardt, Peter Rosendorff, Ken Scheve, Ed Schwartz, Christina Sevilla, Michael Simon, Jay Smith, Debra Steger, Joel Trachtman, Todd Weiler, seminar participants in the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security (PIPES) at the University of Chicago, and two anonymous referees. All shortcomings are, of course, my own. For research support, I thank the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For research assistance, I thank Alex Muggah, Krzysztof Pelc, and Scott Winter.
Voting for Change: Calculation, Community, and Euro Referendums
- Joseph Jupille, David Leblang
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- 04 October 2007, pp. 763-782
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Referendum votes on adoption of the euro in Denmark (2000) and Sweden (2003) provide unprecedented natural experiments through which to study the political economy of money. Using exit polling data and multinomial logit statistical models that allow us to separate preferences for the euro from preferences for the European Union (EU), we test economic “calculation” and political “community” as determinants of individual-level preferences over adoption of the euro. We find that “calculation” operates most clearly where, as in Sweden, the choice of a fixed versus a floating exchange rate regime is at stake, while “community” exerts strong effects across the two cases.
We would like to thank Krister Andersson, Jerry Cohen, Robert Fishman, Jennifer Fitzgerald, Jeff Frieden, Eric Helleiner, Jacques Hymans, Lars Jonung, Kate McNamara, Jennifer Wolak, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, and Helga Sverrisdottir for outstanding research assistance. We are grateful to Jens Wagner of the Danish Data Archive and Torbjörn Berglund of the Swedish Social Science Dataservice for providing the data used in this note. Neither these individuals nor their respective agencies are responsible for the interpretations contained herein.
Access to Protection: Domestic Institutions and Trade Policy in Democracies
- Sean D. Ehrlich
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- 26 July 2007, pp. 571-605
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Previous institutional explanations of trade policy have focused on the role of proportional representation on the promotion of free trade. This explanation generates numerous unsolved anomalies and provides limited guidance in explaining the difference between proportional representation countries and between majoritarian countries as well as within-country variation in trade policy. This article introduces a more general institutional theory that argues that the number of access points provided by institutions is the crucial institutional feature, as increasing the number of access points makes lobbying less costly, which benefits protectionists. From this, I hypothesize that the number of parties in government, the number of electoral districts, the nature of the vote, and other such institutions affect the level of protection and that, once these factors are controlled for, proportional representation has no impact on trade policy. I test this theory on tariff data in the post–World War II developed democracies and find broad support for these hypotheses.
This article was previously presented at the 2004 Annual Meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association. I would like to thank Alan Deardorff, Rob Franzese, Matt Golder, Mike Hanmer, Jude Hays, Cherie Maestas, Corrine McConnaughy, Will Moore, James D. Morrow, Won-Ho Park, and Jeff Staton for advice and comments and Yoshi Ono for excellent research assistance. All errors, of course, remain my own.
Sovereign Bonds and the “Democratic Advantage”: Does Regime Type Affect Credit Rating Agency Ratings in the Developing World?
- Candace C. Archer, Glen Biglaiser, Karl DeRouen
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- 11 April 2007, pp. 341-365
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The importance of sovereign bond ratings has grown recently as assessments by credit rating agencies (CRAs) influence the cost of capital. Understanding how CRAs determine country ratings is difficult based on the secretive nature of these agencies. Controlling for the common explanations in the literature, we use panel data and interviews to investigate the role of the “democratic advantage” and other determinants on bond ratings set by Moody's Investor Services, Standard and Poor's, and Fitch Ratings for fifty developing countries from 1987 to 2003. We find that regime type and most other political factors have little effect on bond raters. Instead, trade, inflation, growth, and bond default strongly affect sovereign ratings. The message for policymakers in developing countries is that factors that support bond repayment are most useful for enhancing CRA ratings.
The authors' names are listed alphabetically to indicate equal contribution. For comments on previous versions of this article, we are grateful to Matthias Kaelberer, Sebastian Saiegh, Tim Sinclair, Mike Tomz, Paul Vaaler, Jeff Wooldridge, as well as panelists and participants of the ISA 2006. We thank Nate Jensen, Layna Mosley, and Andy Sobel for helping us make contacts with bond raters. We also thank Tai Scelfo for her research assistance. We greatly acknowledge the generosity of the bond raters for giving us insights on the ratings process. Portions of this research were supported by a 2005 Small Grant by the American Political Science Association.
Argumentation and Compromise: Ireland's Selection of the Territorial Status Quo Norm
- Markus Kornprobst
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- 25 January 2007, pp. 69-98
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How do states come to select norms? I contend that, given a number of conditions are present, states select norms in three ideal-typical stages: innovative argumentation, persuasive argumentation, and compromise. This norm selection mechanism departs from the existing literature in two important ways. First, my research elaborates on the literature on advocacy networks. I explain why agents engage in an advocacy for a normative idea in the first place; I add the epistemic dimension of reasoning to argumentation theory; and I show in detail the pathways through which persuasive argumentation links an advocated idea and already-established sets of meaning. Second, synthesizing rationalist and constructivist selection mechanisms, I contend that successful argumentation makes recalcitrant actors eager to reach a compromise with the advocates as long as this does not violate their most cherished beliefs. The Republic of Ireland's eventual selection of the territorial status quo norm in the late 1990s lends empirical evidence to this norm selection mechanism.
I would like to thank Michael Barnett, Steven Bernstein, Corneliu Bjola, Ian Cooper, Ted Hopf, Sandy Irvine, Jennifer Mitzen, Daniel Nexon, Nisha Shah, Janice Gross Stein, Susan Gross Solomon, Allona Sund, Vincent Pouliot, Alexander Wendt, Ruben Zaiotti, and, most of all, Emanuel Adler for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also greatly indebted to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of IO for their detailed and insightful comments. Funding for this research was generously provided by an Ontario Graduate Fellowship, the Joint Initiative for German and European Studies at the University of Toronto, and the Mershon Center at the Ohio State University.
Elections, Special Interests, and Financial Crisis
- Philip Keefer
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- 26 July 2007, pp. 607-641
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A large literature concludes that democracy has ambiguous effects on public policy and that political checks and balances exacerbate crisis. The analysis in this article finds that although democracies are no less likely to experience banking crises, in the event of financial crisis, competitively elected governments intervene more rapidly in insolvent banks and make transfers to them that are between 10 and 20 percent of gross domestic product less than those made by nondemocratic governments. Their countries suffer far smaller growth collapses. However, political checks and balances have no effect on government responses to financial crisis. A simple model offers new explanations for these regime effects. First, for those public policies for which voter information and political credibility are particularly likely to be problematic (financial regulation), electoral accountability matters only when the consequences of failure become large and visible (financial crisis). Second, checks and balances reduce political incentives to seek rents, offsetting the delays they induce in crisis response. The analysis in this article underlines the importance of considering regime effects on political incentives to cater to special interests at the expense of broad social interests, and of avoiding aggregated and subjective measures of democracy that can obscure the identification of regime effects.
This article benefited from the generous comments of George Clarke, Robert Cull, and Patrick Honohan, and from those of participants at the 6th International Conference on Finance and Development, Moscow 2005; and in seminars at the University of California, Los Angeles, Universität Basel, and the Inter-American Development Bank.
Inequality and the Territorial Fragmentation of Solidarity
- Pablo Beramendi
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- 04 October 2007, pp. 783-820
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A long tradition of research has shown decentralized political structures as an important cause behind lower levels of redistribution and higher levels of inequality. This article offers an alternative interpretation of the association between fragmented fiscal structures and higher levels of inequality. I argue that the distributive effects of decentralization depend on the preexisting territorial patterns of inequality. Therefore, the political choice between alternative fiscal structures is largely driven by their expected distributive consequences. As a result, the territorial structure of inequality becomes an important factor to explain why some fiscal structures are more integrated than others. Two mechanisms link regional income distributions and preferences about the decentralization of redistributive policy: differences in the demand for redistribution associated with interregional income differences, and differences in the demand for social insurance associated with the incidence of labor market risks. I test the argument using a data set of fourteen countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) over the period 1980–2000. In addition, I illustrate the potential of the approach by analyzing why social solidarity remains territorially fragmented in the European Union despite the fact that it has a common currency and a common market.
Previous versions of this article were presented in seminars at Cornell University, Syracuse University, Duke University, and the 2005 APSA meetings. I benefited from comments in all these events. In addition, I thank Christopher Anderson, Tony Atkinson, Neal Beck, Carles Boix, Matt Cleary, Thomas R. Cusack, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Gösta Esping-Andersen, Kai Konrad, Mitchell Orenstein, Jonas Pontusson, Adam Przeworski, Jonathan Rodden, David Rueda, David Soskice, Ernesto Stein, Duane Swank, Daniel Treisman, Brian Taylor, Michael Wallerstein, and Erik Wibbels for their very helpful comments on earlier versions. Krishna Ayyangar provided excellent research assistance. Finally, I want to thank Lisa Martin and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions. Financial support from the Juan March Institute, Nuffield College (Oxford), the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and the Center for Policy Research (Syracuse University) is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.
The Benefit of the Doubt: Testing an Informational Theory of the Rally Effect
- Michael Colaresi
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- 25 January 2007, pp. 99-143
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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.
Mercenaries: Strong Norm, Weak Law
- Sarah V. Percy
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- 11 April 2007, pp. 367-397
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In this article I examine how a weak international law can be created despite the presence of a strong norm, and I use weak law to probe the relationship between social and legal norms. International law dealing with mercenaries is notoriously flawed. These flaws have been attributed to the idea that state interest (or lack of interest) led to the development of intentionally weak law. In fact, ineffective anti-mercenary law is the result of the influence of norms. A strong norm against mercenary use has led states to devise a definition that indicated what they found problematic about mercenaries, and differentiated mercenaries from other actors. This definition followed the anti-mercenary norm but created a number of loopholes, which were made worse by the fact that commitment to the norm was so strong that states were unable to make adjustments necessary to create more effective law. The development of the law against mercenaries was further undermined by the pressures of a competing norm. During the 1980s, creation of a UN Convention to deal with mercenaries was stymied by the fact that many states were seeking to protect the norm of state responsibility, and the conflict between this norm and the anti-mercenary norm delayed the Convention to such a degree it was superseded by events. Weak anti-mercenary law, created in the presence of a strong anti-mercenary norm, can demonstrate four things about the relationship between social and legal norms: that states advocate the creation of law because of what it is rather than what it does; that legal institutionalization is not necessarily good for the further development of a norm; that strong commitment to a norm can lead to the creation of weak law; and that social and legal norms might not differ because the latter is more effective.
The author would like to thank Audrey Kurth Cronin, Guy Goodwin-Gill, Henry Shue, Adam Roberts, Henry Shue, Christine Whelan, Dominik Zaum, and the two anonymous referees, for their comments. Helpful comments were made by Joanna Harrington and Neil MacFarlane on an earlier version of this piece.