International organizations are widely believed to undermine domestic democracy. Our analysis challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that multilateral institutions can enhance the quality of national democratic processes, even in well-functioning democracies, in a number of important ways: by restricting the power of special interest factions, protecting individual rights, and improving the quality of democratic deliberation, while also increasing capacities to achieve important public purposes. The article discusses conflicts and complementarities between multilateralism and democracy, outlines a working conception of constitutional democracy, elaborates theoretically the ways in which multilateral institutions can enhance constitutional democracy, and discusses the empirical conditions under which multilateralism is most likely to have net democratic benefits, using contemporary examples to illustrate the analysis. The overall aim is to articulate a set of critical democratic standards appropriate for evaluating and helping to guide the reform of international institutions.

Many have argued that the success of European integration is predicated on reinforcing market structures and some have gone further to state that the creation of a transnational market results in a decoupling of markets from their national political and social frameworks, thus threatening to unravel historical social bargains. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and John Ruggie and using their insights regarding the social embedding of markets, we dissent from this view by examining how the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has handled a key sector of the emerging European market—labor mobility. We argue that rather than disembedding markets, decisions of the ECJ—just as Polanyi and Ruggie would have predicted—activate new social and political arrangements. We find evidence for the development of a new legal and political structure, largely inspired by the Court but also imbricated in European Union legislation, at the regional level.

What accounts for the spread of political protest and contention across countries? Analyzing the wildfire of attempted revolutions in 1848, the present article assesses four causal mechanisms for explaining diffusion, namely external pressure from a great power (such as revolutionary France after 1789); the promotion of new norms and values—such as liberalism and democracy—by more advanced countries; rational learning from successful contention in other nations; or boundedly rational, potentially distorted inferences from select foreign experiences. The patterns in which revolutionary contention spread and eyewitness reports from all sides of the ensuing conflicts suggest that bounded rationality played a crucial role: cognitive heuristics that deviate from fully rational procedures drew attention to some experiences but not others and induced both challengers and defenders of the established order to draw rash conclusions from these experiences, particularly the French monarchy's fall in February 1848. My study also shows, however, that other factors made important contributions, for instance by preparing the ground for the wave of regime contention.

When and under what conditions is an existing international institution most likely to be replaced by a new one? Conventional international relations theories offer only partial insights into this question and seldom address it directly. But replacement occurs in a variety of important international contexts. For example, the United Nations replaced the League of Nations, the WTO replaced the GATT, and most recently, the Ottawa Convention banning landmines replaced Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). I argue that the concept of legitimacy, commonly defined as “the belief that an institution ought to be obeyed,” and careful attention to the development of the existing institution are necessary to understand replacement. After developing a theoretical framework to conceptualize the relationship between legitimacy and replacement, this article traces the origins and development of the largely overlooked institutional predecessor to the Ottawa Convention: the CCW. It then shows how ideational change, driven by transnational efforts to delegitimate the CCW, paved the way for a shift in discourse from control to disarmament that made the creation of a new institution possible. The article concludes by seeking to generalize from the CCW experience through a preliminary discussion of other ways and cases in which legitimacy might affect institutional replacement and persistence.

Although it is widely acknowledged that an understanding of mass attitudes about trade is crucial to the political economy of foreign commerce, only a handful of studies have addressed this topic. These studies have focused largely on testing two models, both of which emphasize that trade preferences are shaped by how trade affects an individual's income. The factor endowments or Heckscher-Ohlin model posits that these preferences are affected primarily by a person's skills. The specific factors or Ricardo-Viner model posits that trade preferences depend on the industry in which a person works. We find little support for either of these models using two representative national surveys of Americans. The only potential exception involves the effects of education. Initial tests indicate that educational attainment and support for open trade are directly related, which is often interpreted as support for the Heckscher-Ohlin model. However, further analysis reveals that education's effects are less representative of skill than of individuals' anxieties about involvement with out-groups in their own country and beyond. Furthermore, we find strong evidence that trade attitudes are guided less by material self-interest than by perceptions of how the U.S. economy as a whole is affected by trade.

Many theories of international relations contain a narrative of progress and explain that progress with reference to evolutionary imagery. This article examines critically: the relevance of Darwinian and Lamarckian models of international relations to the evolution of international ethics and institutions; and the possibility that the ethics and norms are likely to be more consistent with existing world orders than challengers to it. Specifically, this article draws from evolutionary social science and organizational theory to develop a framework to explore the initial diversity of the meaning and practices of humanitarianism; how the combination of environmental mechanisms and organizational culture led many humanitarian agencies to adapt to their environment in ways that incorporated politics; and the subsequent countermovement by some agencies who wanted to purify humanitarianism. I then apply this framework to explain the recent history of four international aid agencies. I conclude with several observations regarding how the model as applied to these cases allows us to examine critically the selection mechanisms that do and do not account for ethical change and how scholars of international norms, ethics, and progress should be attentive to how principled actors are creatures of the world they want to transform.

Why do international peacebuilders fail to address the local causes of peace process failures? The existing explanations of peacebuilding failures, which focus on constraints and vested interests, do not explain the international neglect of local conflict. In this article, I show how discursive frames shape international intervention and preclude international action on local violence. Drawing on more than 330 interviews, multi-sited ethnography, and document analysis, I develop a case study of the Democratic Republic of Congo's transition from war to peace and democracy (2003–2006). I demonstrate that local agendas played a decisive role in sustaining local, national, and regional violence. However, a postconflict peacebuilding frame shaped the international understanding of violence and intervention in such a way that local conflict resolution appeared irrelevant and illegitimate. This frame included four key elements: international actors labeled the Congo a “postconflict” situation; they believed that violence there was innate and therefore acceptable even in peacetime; they conceptualized international intervention as exclusively concerned with the national and international realms; and they saw holding elections, as opposed to local conflict resolution, as a workable, appropriate, and effective tool for state- and peacebuilding. This frame authorized and justified specific practices and policies while precluding others, notably local conflict resolution, ultimately dooming the peacebuilding efforts. In conclusion, I contend that analyzing discursive frames is a fruitful approach to the puzzle of international peacebuilding failures beyond the Congo.

For many political observers the successful creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) came as a surprise, as major powers, in particular the United States, had opposed the plans for the ICC. Moreover, the institutional design of the ICC entails enormous sovereignty costs for states but only uncertain benefits. An analysis of the negotiations suggests that the court's successful creation can be attributed to persuasion and discourse within negotiations, that is, a shift in states' interests. The article develops a theoretical model of institutional change that defines the conditions under which persuasion and discourse can affect collective decision making. In particular, this study attempts to show that if (traditionally) weaker actors alter normative and institutional settings of negotiations they can further the chance of persuasion and discourse.

This article explains a shift in the way transatlantic authorities managed conflicts over the cross-border regulation of securities markets: from cooperation skewed heavily toward the preferences of U.S. officials and accepted grudgingly by European counterparts; to a Euro-American regulatory condominium characterized by close interactions among decision makers and mutual accommodation. In the final decades of the twentieth century, the asymmetric influence wielded by U.S. securities market authorities had few parallels in other regulatory areas. Why, then, did U.S. officials become more accommodating and European authorities more influential, and why did the turning point occur in 2002 and 2003, an unlikely moment for intensified transatlantic sovereignty sharing? My study shows that institutional change inside the EU recast the North Atlantic balance of regulatory leverage and thereby was the primary factor behind the reshaping of transatlantic cooperation. Internal EU regulatory centralization changed the expectations of U.S. and European firms and authorities and generated new incentives in Washington, D.C., for accommodation and closer transatlantic coordination. My explanation differs from models that, accepting U.S. financial pre-eminence as a given, attribute variance in cross-border regulatory cooperation to factors such as incentives derived from the particularities of issue areas or preferences rooted in domestic politics. While resonating with a well-established theme from the realist branch of IPE, my findings have broad theoretical significance, and open new avenues for dialogue between realists and constructivists about the social, political, and institutional foundations of power in global economic affairs. The transatlantic political process set off by financial transformation in Europe reveals contemporary sources of systemic change and raises questions about what the EU's ascendance as a global financial regulator will mean in the aftermath of the late-2000s crisis.

This article examines whether democracies contribute more to the provision of global public goods. It thus contributes to the debate on the effects of domestic institutions on international cooperation. The focus is on human-induced climate change, in Stern's words “the biggest market failure the world has ever seen.”1 Using new data on climate change cooperation we study a cross-section of 185 countries in 1990–2004. The results show that the effect of democracy on levels of political commitment to climate change mitigation (policy output) is positive. In contrast, the effect on policy outcomes, measured in terms of emission levels and trends, is ambiguous. These results demonstrate that up until now the democracy effect has not been able to override countervailing forces that emanate from the free-rider problem, discounting of future benefits of climate change mitigation, and other factors that cut against efforts to reduce emissions. Even though democracies have had a slow start in moving from political and legal commitments (policy output) to emission reductions (policy outcomes), particularly in the transportation sector, we observe some encouraging signs. The main implication of our findings for research on international politics is that greater efforts should be made to study policy output and outcome side by side. This will help in identifying whether more democratic countries experience larger “words-deeds” gaps also in other policy areas, and whether there are systematic differences of this kind between domestic and international commitments and across different policy areas.

Regulating private transactions across international boundaries has long posed a challenge to states. Extraterritoriality—the direct regulation of persons and conduct outside a state's borders—is an increasingly common mechanism by which strong states attempt to manage problems associated with transnational activities. This article seeks to account for variation across issues in the willingness of U.S. courts to regulate extraterritorially by focusing on the potential for external conduct to undermine domestic legal rules. It suggests further how attention to domestic-level regulatory processes, with particular focus on the role of private actors, can shed new light on transnational rulemaking and enforcement.

During the nineteenth century, states routinely defeated insurgent foes. Over the twentieth century, however, this pattern reversed itself, with states increasingly less likely to defeat insurgents or avoid meeting at least some of their demands. What accounts for this pattern of outcomes in counterinsurgency (COIN) wars? We argue that increasing mechanization within state militaries after World War I is primarily responsible for this shift. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, modern militaries possess force structures that inhibit information collection among local populations. This not only complicates the process of sifting insurgents from noncombatants but increases the difficulty of selectively applying rewards and punishment among the fence-sitting population. Modern militaries may therefore inadvertently fuel, rather than deter, insurgencies. We test this argument with a new data set of 286 insurgencies (1800–2005) and a paired comparison of two U.S. Army divisions in Iraq (2003–2004). We find that higher levels of mechanization, along with external support for insurgents and the counterinsurgent's status as an occupier, are associated with an increased probability of state defeat. By contrast, we find only partial support for conventional power- and regime-based explanations, and no support for the view that rough terrain favors insurgent success.

We model how the size of a leader's support coalition and government revenues affect trades between policy concessions and aid. We find that aid benefits donor and recipient leaders, while harming the recipient's, but not the donor's, citizenry. The willingness to grant policy concessions for aid depends on how easily leaders can reimburse supporters for their concession. As coalition size increases, incumbents rely more on public goods to reward supporters, making it difficult to compensate for policy concessions. Small-coalition leaders rely more on private goods to retain office, making it easier for them to grant policy concessions for aid. Empirical tests of bilateral aid transfers by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations between 1960 and 2001 support the predictions that (1) aid is given by wealthy, large-coalition systems; (2) relatively poor, small-coalition systems are most likely to get aid; but, (3) conditional on receiving aid, the amount increases as the recipient's coalition size, wealth, and policy salience increase. Evidence suggests that OECD members have little humanitarian motivation for aid giving.

Nontax revenues make up a substantial amount of government revenue around the world, though scholars usually focus on individual sources of such revenue (for example, foreign aid and state-owned oil companies). Using a theory of regime change that builds on recent models of the redistributional foundations of dictatorships and democracies, I generate hypotheses regarding all nontax revenue and regime stability. I argue that an increase in nontax revenue should be associated with less taxation of elites in democracies, more social spending in dictatorships, and more stability for both regime types. I find support for all three of these hypotheses in a cross-sectional time-series analysis, covering all countries and years for which the necessary data are available. Significantly, I show that the particular source of nontax revenue does not make a difference: they all act similarly with regard to regime stability and the causal mechanisms.

Policymaking power enables governments to redistribute income to powerful interests in society. However, some governments exhibit greater concern for aggregate welfare than others. This government behavior may itself be endogenously determined by a number of economic, political, and institutional factors. Trade policy, being fundamentally redistributive, provides a valuable context in which the welfare-mindedness of governments may be empirically evaluated. This article investigates quantitatively the welfare-mindedness of governments and attempts to understand these political and institutional determinants of the differences in government behavior across countries.

This article moves from deconstruction to reconstruction in research methodology. It proposes pragmatism as a way to escape from epistemological deadlock. We first show that social scientists are mistaken in their hope to obtain warranted knowledge through traditional scientific methods. We then show that pragmatism has grown from tacit commonsense to an explicit item on the agenda of the international relations discipline. We suggest that a coherent pragmatic approach consists of two elements: the recognition of knowledge generation as a social and discursive activity, and the orientation of research toward the generation of useful knowledge. To offer a concrete example of what pragmatic methodology can look like, we propose the research strategy of abduction. We assess various forms of research design to further elucidate how pragmatic research works in practice.

Recent work suggests that multilateral security institutions, such as the UN Security Council, can influence foreign policy through public opinion. According to this view, authorization can increase public support for foreign policy, freeing domestic constraints. Governments that feel constrained by public opinion may thus alter their foreign policies to garner external authorization. These claims challenge traditional realist views about the role of international organizations in security affairs, which tend to focus on direct enforcement mechanisms and neglect indirect channels of influence. To examine these claims, this article investigates the first link in this causal chain—the effect of institutional statements on public opinion. Strategic information arguments, as opposed to arguments about the symbolic legitimacy of specific organizations or the procedural importance of consultation, posit that the effect of institutional statements on public opinion is conditional on public perceptions of member states' interests. This article tests this conditional relationship in the context of changes in presidential approval surrounding military disputes, using a measure of preference distance between the United States and veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council. Findings indicate that short-term changes in presidential approval surrounding the onset of military disputes in the United States between 1946 and 2001 have been significantly larger when accompanied by a positive resolution for a Security Council that is more distant in terms of foreign policy preferences. The article also discusses polling data during the 1990s and 2000s that support the strategic information perspective.

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.

International institutions within the past thirty years become the subject of renewed interest as scholars vigorously dispute their utility. Neorealists draw on the post–World War II era to advance sweeping general claims of institutional inefficacy. This study, by contrast, deploys the same hard-test method Grieco applied to the 1970s Tokyo Round negotiations to the crisis-rife 1870s to construct a unique methodological objective: a rigorous hard-test of nineteenth-century institutional autonomy. Three principal findings emerged. First, the maintenance of a liberal world economy in the turbulent 1870s is explained by an unlikely commercial instrument and the unprecedented regime design of an unexplored international institution—respectively the unconditional most-favored-nation (MFN) clause and the informal conventional tariff system (CTS) regime it underpinned—not British hegemony. Second, the international trade regime was not a public good unilaterally provisioned by “hegemonic” Britain via the 1846 Corn Laws Repeal. The regime was instead a private good that was collectively provisioned by all its constituent member states via the unprecedented interstate practices institutionalized in the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty and then autonomously maintained by a negarchical and self-enforcing sanctioning mechanism. Finally, the informal CTS regime's enforcement mechanism autonomously altered the interests and behaviors of states in directions incongruent with executive preferences solely through the brute force of rational calculations imposed by decentralized international institutional constraints. Both the French and British executives in the 1870s believed the regime was normatively inappropriate and unsuccessfully attempted to exit amid eight system-threatening crises. Nonetheless, the MFN-based regime's self-enforcing sanctioning mechanism autonomously induced compliance: conceptualized as unitary states' behavior deviating from executives' first-order preference. The extraordinarily turbulent 1870s therefore provide an unexplored historical vantage point to make strong institutionalist claims in an era, issue area, and under conditions that they are least likely to be validated.

Models of trade policy often depend on the efficient aggregation of individual preferences. While much of the recent empirical work on trade focuses on whether domestic coalitions form along class or sectoral lines, the process of preference aggregation itself remains understudied. In democratic countries, voting is typically assumed to be an unproblematic mechanism for aggregating preferences, but such an assumption may be misleading when the salience of trade policy is low or heterogeneous throughout the electorate. Using data from a survey of 36,501 potential voters in the 2006 U.S. midterm congressional elections, this article explores the salience of trade policy for voters as a whole and for populations predicted to be most affected by changing trade patterns. The article offers an estimation of trade policy salience based on the degree to which voters held Senate incumbents accountable for their 2005 vote on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, relative to roll call votes on other issues of the day. The article finds trade policy salience to be relatively low in terms of stated importance, in voters' knowledge of their representatives' policy positions, and in its effect on voters' propensity to vote for the incumbent. The low salience of trade policy, particularly among highly affected groups, calls into question voter-driven models of trade policy.