Over the past fifty years, barriers to international trade have decreased substantially. A key source of this decline in protectionism has been the proliferation of agreements among countries to liberalize commerce. In this article, we analyze the domestic political conditions under which states have concluded such agreements and, more generally, explore the factors affecting interstate economic cooperation. We argue that interstate cooperation on commercial issues depends heavily on the political regime types of participants: as states become more democratic, they are increasingly likely to conclude trade agreements. To test our claim, we examine whether the regime types of states have influenced their propensity to form and expand preferential trading arrangements (PTAs) during the period since World War II. We find that democratic countries are about twice as likely to form a PTA as autocratic countries, and that pairs of democracies are roughly four times as likely to do so as autocratic pairs. These results provide strong evidence that democracies are more commercially cooperative than less democratic countries.

Scholars and policymakers alike have recently begun to tout the ability of international organizations (IOs) to encourage and secure democracy throughout the world. Despite this stance, little theoretical attention or empirical investigation has attempted to ascertain why or whether this relationship truly exists. One challenge to answering this puzzle is that extant theories of international institutions do not generally delineate clear hypotheses about how IOs influence domestic politics. In this article, I address this paucity of both theory and empirical evidence. I delineate three causal mechanisms that link IOs to domestic actors' calculations about political liberalization and test the argument. I find that membership in regional IOs is correlated with transitions to democracy during the period from 1950 to 1992.

Although relatively unknown outside of Europe, comitology committees are an object of considerable controversy in the European Union (EU). Controversy stems from their pivotal role in overseeing policy implementation authority delegated from the Council of Ministers (Council) to the European Commission (Commission). In this article, we employ a game-theoretic model to analyze the influence of these, committees on policy outcomes. Our analysis provides three important insights. First, we show that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, comitology committees move outcomes toward the Commission's preferred policies rather than the Council's. Second, we demonstrate that the possibility of a Council veto may also move outcomes away from Council members' policy preferences and toward the Commission's. Third, the 1999 changes to the comitology procedures, designed to enhance the Commission's autonomy in policymaking, may have had the exact opposite effect. Paradoxically, we conclude that comitology serves to enhance the Commission's role in policy implementation and thereby strengthens the separation of powers within the EU.

In this paper, we explain why the U.S. government chose multilateral security arrangements in Europe and bilateral ones in Asia in the 1940s and 1950s. After reviewing the inadequacies of a number of universal and indeterminate explanations, we put forward three explanations—great power status, efficient responses to threats, and regional identity—which rely on the combination of material and social forces for their explanatory power. Starting with common rationalist explanations that focus on material capabilities and institutional efficiency to explain the forms of international cooperation, we add to them the important effect that America's collective identity had on the formulation of its foreign policy goals. U.S. policymakers believed that the United States was a natural part of the North Atlantic community but that Southeast Asia was part of an alien political community. This difference helped drive the U.S. government to adopt divergent policies in two regions that, far from being natural, were constructed politically only in the 1940s. We conclude by pointing to the advantage of eclectic combinations of rationalist and constructivist insights, with an extension to the politics of regional collective identity in the 1990s.

The contemporary debate on compliance has been framed in terms of two contending perspectives on how best to make states comply with international rules: enforcement or management. Whereas enforcement theorists stress a coercive strategy of monitoring and sanctions, management theorists embrace a problem-solving approach based on capacity building, rule interpretation, and transparency. In this article, I challenge the conception that enforcement and management are competing strategies for achieving compliance. Based on the case of the European Union (EU) and a comparison with other international regimes, I suggest that enforcement and management mechanisms are most effective when combined. The twinning of cooperative and coercive instruments in a “management-enforcement ladder” makes the EU highly successful in combating violations, thus reducing non-compliance to a temporal phenomenon. An examination of regimes in the areas of trade, environment, and human rights lends additional support to this proposition; compliance systems that offer both forms of mechanism are particularly effective in securing rule conformance, whereas systems that only rely on one of the strategies suffer in identifiable ways.

Relatively weak ethnic groups mobilize and rebel against their governments just as frequently (or infrequently) as strong ones. However, such seemingly irrational behavior is not inconsistent with a rationalist approach to ethnic separatism. A bargaining model that treats all the relevant actors as strategic players suggests that power disparities between an ethnic minority and the state—including those based on a group's access to third-party intervention—should affect how the state treats the group but not the likelihood that the group rebels against the state. Greater mistreatment by the state should not be correlated with greater external intervention on a group's behalf. New empirical support for the model is drawn from the Minorities at Risk data set, and the discussion has implications for the field of international relations beyond ethnic conflict to extended deterrence more generally.

In this article, we reconsider the rarity of the Long Peace in the light of a probability model that targets the collective experience of major powers. Our examination shows that consecutive periods of peace equal to the forty-two years of the so-called Long Peace are not uncommon over the past eighteen decades—these periods occurred slightly more than 30 percent of the time. The period between 1816 and 1913 actually contains less war involvement by major powers than the period of the putative Long Peace. Our analysis demonstrates that long periods of major power peace are not unusual; periods of major power war are more exceptional than normal. Thus we conclude that the Long Peace is not rare and that its role in evaluating theories of war is misleading.