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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article examines the factors that led to the end of the Cold War from the perspective of the most important U.S. decision makers in both the Reagan and Bush presidencies. The centerpiece of the analysis is a longitudinal study that compares the timing of U.S. decision makers' assessments of the nature of the Soviet threat with changes in Soviet power, foreign policies, and domestic ideology and institutions. This research design allows one to determine if America's key leaders were basing their foreign policies primarily in response to reductions in Soviet power (as realists assert), to more cooperative international policies (as systemic-constructivist and costly signals arguments claim), or to changes in Soviet domestic politics (as democratic peace theories argue). I find that American leaders' beliefs that the Cold War was ending corresponded most closely with Soviet domestic-ideological and institutional changes. As soon as America's most important leaders believed both that Gorbachev was dedicated to core tenets of liberal ideology, and that these values would likely be protected by liberal institutions, they believed the Cold War was ending. These findings help to both illustrate the key determinants of leaders' perceptions of international threats and explain why outstanding Cold War disputes were resolved so smoothly, with the Americans primarily attempting to reassure the Soviets rather than coercing them with America's power superiority.I wish to thank the following people for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article and related projects that led to it: Cliff Bob, Steve Brooks, Dale Copeland, Robert Jervis, Mark Kramer, Jeff Legro, Jack Levy, Allen Lynch, Sean Lynn-Jones, Kimberly Marten, Rose McDermott, Steve Miller, Kevin Narizny, John Owen, Steve Rosen, John Sawicki, Monica Duffy Toft, Steve Walt, and especially Lisa Martin and two anonymous reviewers at International Organization. I also thank the participants in the seminars on international security at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, both at Harvard University, and the Center for International Studies at Princeton University. For generous financial and institutional support, I remain grateful to the Olin Institute and the Belfer Center.

A central assumption in the globalization literature is that economic openness generates economic insecurity and volatility. Based on this assumption, scholars of international political economy have proposed the compensation hypothesis, which claims that globalization bolsters rather than undermines the welfare state by increasing public demand for social protection against externally generated economic instability. The openness-volatility link is dubious, however, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. In this study, I revisit the volatility assumption, focusing on a crucial difference between openness and external risk in their effect on volatility. My statistical analysis of a panel data set from 175 countries (1950–2002) finds a consistent effect of external risk on volatility of the major economic aggregates, but a largely insignificant effect of openness. These findings suggest that economic volatility may be a mistaken link in explaining the openness-spending nexus, calling for further research on the causal mechanisms linking the two.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, and at the 2004 Ph.D. Colloquium of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program, Florida Atlantic University. My deepest thanks go to the late Michael Wallerstein whose insights, guidance, and encouragement were indispensable for this research. I also thank Stephen Haggard, Dukhong Kim, Jeffrey Morton, Edward Schwerin, Yumin Sheng, and Yael Wolinsky-Nahmias for their invaluable support and thoughtful comments. Finally, I would like to appreciate the editor-in-chief and two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive criticisms that greatly improved this article.

Does institutional variation have implications for questions of conflict and peace? Theory indicates that it does, but extant studies that address this question treat such institutions as homogenous. Building on recent theoretical advances, I argue that cooperation on a wide array of economic issues and regular meetings of high-level officials provide member-states with valuable information regarding the interests and resolve of their counterparts. This, in turn, reduces uncertainty and improves the prospects of a peaceful resolution of interstate disputes. To test the effect of these two institutional features on the level of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs), I present an original data set that measures variation in institutional design and implementation across a large number of regional integration arrangements (RIAs) in the 1980s and 1990s. Employing multivariate regression techniques and the regional unit of analysis, I find that a wider scope of economic activity and regular meetings among high-level officials mitigate violent conflict. These results remain intact after controlling for alternative explanations and addressing concerns of endogeneity.Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the 45th Anual Convention of the International Studies Association, Montreal, March 16–20, 2004 and at the 100th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 2–5, 2004. For helpful comments and suggestions I thank the editor and two anonymous referees of this journal, as well as Paul Fritz, Yoav Gortzak, Edward Mansfield, Timothy McKeown, Brian Pollins, Peter Rosendorff, Donald Sylvan, Alex Thompson, and Peter Trumbore.