How do rising levels of international interconnectedness affect social, economic, and political conditions for women? Research on gender and international relations frequently offers clear propositions but seldom submits them to broad, quantitative testing. This article begins to fill that gap. We advance the hypothesis that, on balance and over time, increasing cross-national exchange and communication lead to improvements in women's status and equality. Economic aspects of globalization can bring new opportunities and resources to women. But equally important, globalization promotes the diffusion of ideas and norms of equality for women. In an analysis of 180 countries from 1975 to 2000, employing cross-sectional–time-series regression techniques, we examine the impact of several measures of globalization on women's levels of life expectancy, literacy, and participation in the economy and parliamentary office. International trade, foreign direct investment, membership in the United Nations (UN) and World Bank, and ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), are associated with improved conditions for women.A grant from the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Irvine, supported this research. The authors are grateful for constructive comments from participants in the faculty research colloquium of the Department of Political Science at Brigham Young University. The authors also received helpful suggestions from their fellow panelists at the 2004 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association and from the editor of IO, Lisa Martin, and two anonymous reviewers.

Certain regions of the world experience more conflict than others. Previous analyses have shown that a civil war in one country significantly increases the likelihood that neighboring states will experience conflict. This finding, however, still remains largely unexplained. We argue that population movements are an important mechanism by which conflict spreads across regions. Refugee flows are not only the consequence of political turmoil—the presence of refugees and displaced populations can also increase the risk of subsequent conflict in host and origin countries. Refugees expand rebel social networks and constitute a negative externality of civil war. Although the vast majority of refugees never directly engage in violence, refugee flows may facilitate the transnational spread of arms, combatants, and ideologies conducive to conflict; they alter the ethnic composition of the state; and they can exacerbate economic competition. We conduct an empirical analysis of the link between refugees and civil conflict since the mid-twentieth century, and we find that the presence of refugees from neighboring countries leads to an increased probability of violence, suggesting that refugees are one important source of conflict diffusion.We would like to thank the participants in the “Resources, Governance Structures, and Civil War” Workshop at the European Consortium for Political Research in Uppsala, Sweden, 13–18 April 2004, for early feedback on previous versions of this article. We would also like to thank Anis Bajrektarevic, Lars-Erik Cederman, David Cunningham, Kristian Berg Harpviken, Béla Hovy, Sarah Lischer, Monty Marshall, Erik Melander, Will H. Moore, Magnus Öberg, and Michael Ward for providing us with data and helpful comments, as well as Jan Ketil Rød for permission to reproduce the map from the program ViewConflicts in Figure 1. Finally, we are grateful for the comments and suggestions of the editors of International Organization and the anonymous reviewers. This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-0351670).

We address the question of how international public goods are financed by analyzing voting in the U.S. Congress on legislation to increase the U.S. contribution to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). We argue that legislators are more likely to vote in favor of an increase (1) the more campaign contributions they obtain from banks that specialize in international lending, and (2) the greater the share of high-skilled “proglobalization” workers in their districts. The first argument supports the inference that a financially strong IMF mitigates the risks of international lending, to the benefit of the lending banks. The second reflects our claim that voters view the IMF as a positive force for global economic integration that—following Stolper-Samuelson reasoning—benefits high-skilled workers. Lastly, we analyze IMF loan decisions and find modest support for the claim that IMF policy reflects the interests of major international banks. Overall, our results suggest that private actors within the United States have individual stakes in funding the IMF.We presented earlier versions of this paper at the 8th Annual International Society for New Institutional Economics Conference (ISNIE), Tucson, Ariz., September–October 2004, and at the Delegation to International Organization Conference, Del Mar, Calif., September 2003. We thank participants for comments. We also thank Michael Hiscox, Mathew McCubbins, J. R. DeShazo, David Lake, Jeffry Frieden, James Vreeland, William R. Clark, Erica Gould, Joseph Joyce, Devesh Kapur, Louis Pauly, Shanker Satyanath, Beth Simmons, and Michael Tierney for suggestions; and Mark Farrales and Molly James for excellent research assistance.

Most macro cross-national studies in political science that analyze the impact of globalization on domestic policies do not sufficiently consider the methodological consequences of diffusion processes, or “Galton's problem,” as it is often referred to. I argue that globalization is a form of diffusion. Therefore it requires a shift from an exclusively functional analysis, which dominates in almost all established comparative studies in the field, to a diffusional analysis. I assume that globalization leads to a shift in focus on the part of political actors from domestic to international issues. I test this hypothesis by examining social expenditure rates of sixteen highly developed welfare states. The results indicate that globalization has become a highly influential factor since the late 1980s in contrast to the years before. In addition to the actual results presented here, the methodological approach of analyzing globalization as diffusion is relevant to other areas of comparative and international politics and may be a tool in future research.The results of this article are based on a research project, “Environmental Problems as a Global Phenomenon,” which is supported by the German Research Society (DFG; JA 638/7). I wish to thank my research assistants Katrin Daedlow and Bertram Welker for supporting me in data collection and analysis. For constructive comments on different versions of the manuscript, I thank Reinhard Wolf, Kerstin Martens, Susanne Pickel, Kati Kuitto, and above all Elizabeth Zelljadt, two anonymous referees, and the editor of this journal. Most of the revision of this article was written while I visited the Department of Political Science at UCLA. I thank George Tsebelis and James Honaker for comments and advice and Michael Lofchie for his hospitality. I also received invaluable support from Heino von Meyer and Herbert Pfeiffer from the OECD Berlin Centre. Finally I would also like to thank Michael Zürn, who motivated me with his statement that comparative country studies might become obsolete in times of globalization. Without this provocation, this article would not have been written.

While increased exposure to the global economy is associated with increased welfare effort in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the opposite holds in the developing world. These differences are typically explained with reference to domestic politics. Tradables, unions, and the like in the developing world are assumed to have less power or interests divergent to those in the OECD—interests that militate against social spending. I claim that such arguments can be complemented with a recognition that developed and developing nations have distinct patterns of integration into global markets. While income shocks associated with international markets are quite modest in the OECD, they are profound in developing nations. In the OECD, governments can respond to those shocks by borrowing on capital markets and spending countercyclically on social programs. No such opportunity exists for most governments in the developing world, most of which have limited access to capital markets in tough times, more significant incentives to balance budgets, and as a result cut social spending at the times it is most needed. Thus, while internationally inspired volatility and income shocks seem not to threaten the underpinnings of the welfare state in rich nations, it undercuts the capacity of governments in the developing world to smooth consumption (and particularly consumption by the poor) across the business cycle.The author would like to thank Steph Haggard, Kristin Bakke, Wongi Choe, Tim Jones, and seminar participants at Duke University, Penn State University, Washington University, MIT, and the University of New Mexico for their helpful comments. Nancy Brune, Mark Hallerberg and Rolf Strauch, and Nita Rudra were very generous in providing their capital account, OECD fiscal, and potential labor power data, respectively.

Recent studies of public attitudes toward trade have converged on one central finding: support for trade restrictions is highest among respondents with the lowest levels of education. This has been interpreted as strong support for the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, the classic economic treatment of the income effects of trade that predicts that trade openness benefits those owning factors of production with which their economy is relatively well endowed (those with skills in the advanced economies) while hurting others (low-skilled workers). We reexamine the available survey data, showing that the impact of education on attitudes toward trade is almost identical among respondents in the active labor force and those who are not (even those who are retired). We also find that, while individuals with college-level educations are far more likely to favor trade openness than others, other types of education have no significant effects on attitudes, and some actually reduce the support for trade, even though they clearly contribute to skill acquisition. Combined, these results strongly suggest that the effects of education on individual trade preferences are not primarily a product of distributional concerns linked to job skills. We suggest that exposure to economic ideas and information among college-educated individuals plays a key role in shaping attitudes toward trade and globalization. This is not to say that distributional issues are not important in shaping attitudes toward trade—just that they are not clearly manifest in the simple, broad association between education levels and support for free trade.The authors would like to thank James Alt, Jeffry Frieden, Robert Lawrence, Dani Rodrik, Ron Rogowski, Ken Scheve, Andy Baker, Peter Gourevitch, and Beth Simmons for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

In Lisa Blaydes's article, “Rewarding Impatience: A Bargaining and Enforcement Model of OPEC,” (International Organization, Spring 2004), the oil production of members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) depends on the extent to which they discount future gains. This comment discusses computer-related errors in the original article and determines how the results change when the errors are rectified. I then add country fixed effects and some additional control variables to the corrected models.I would like to thank Lisa Blaydes for data and helpful discussions and to thank Jim Alt and Mike Kellerman for comments on previous drafts. All remaining errors are my own.

In “Rewarding Impatience: A Bargaining and Enforcement Model of OPEC” (International Organization, Spring 2004) I presented a theoretical model that suggested that in strategic situations where a bargaining phase is followed by an enforcement phase that resembles a prisoners' dilemma, impatient actors earned better outcomes than their more patient rivals. I also modeled the division of cartel profits in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), particularly with regard to the relationship between bargaining strength and disparate time horizons, and found that there is some threshold level for which states that discount the future more heavily tend to receive better production offers than those that do not. The critique presented in Goodrich deals with the final section of the article, which presents the results of statistical analysis testing the implications of these theoretical models.I am grateful to Jeff Lewis, Drew Linzer, and Ken Schultz for suggestions and advice. Many thanks to Thomas Plümper for sharing the computer code for his procedure to analyze fixed effects with time-invariant covariates in Stata. The usual disclaimers apply.