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.

We consider the influence of countries' external security environments on their military spending. We first estimate the ex ante probability that a country will become involved in a fatal militarized interstate dispute using a model of dyadic conflict that incorporates key elements of liberal and realist theories of international relations. We then estimate military spending as a function of the threat of armed interstate conflict and other influences: arms races, the defense expenditures of friendly countries, actual military conflict, democracy, civil war, and national economic output. In a panel of 165 countries, 1950 to 2000, we find our prospectively generated estimate of the external threat to be a powerful variable in explaining military spending. A 1 percentage point increase in the aggregate probability of a fatal militarized dispute, as predicted by our liberal-realist model, leads to a 3 percent increase in a country's military expenditures.

Our article analyzes the impact of the European Union (EU) on border conflicts, in particular how integration and association are related to conflict transformation. We approach this issue from a theoretically as well as empirically grounded constructivist perspective. On this basis we propose a stage model of conflict development, based on the degree of securitization and societal reach of conflict communication. We argue that the EU can transform border conflicts and propose a four pathway-model of EU impact. This model comprises forms of EU impact that are, on the one hand, either actor-driven or indirectly caused by the integration process and have, on the other hand, as their main target either particular policies or the wider society in border conflict areas. We then apply this model to a comparative study of border conflicts, thereby analyzing the conflicts in Northern Ireland, Greece-Turkey, Cyprus, Europe's North (EU-Russia) and Israel-Palestine. We finish with a specification of the conditions of positive and negative EU impact.We are grateful to Gesa Bluhm, Olga Demetriou, Katy Hayward, Pertti Joenniemi, Kemal Kirisci, Yosef Lapid, Andrey Makarychev, David Newman, David Officer, Michelle Pace, Sergei Prozorov, Bahar Rumelili, Myria Vassiliadou, Jevgenia Viktorova, Tobias Werron, Antje Wiener, Haim Yacobi, and the reviewers and editors of this journal for their stimulating inputs, criticism, and support in the preparation of this article. Audiences at the Universities of Bielefeld, Hannover, and Osnabrück, Bilkent University (Ankara), the Viessmann Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Canada) and the copanelists at the BISA conferences 2002 and 2003, the ISA/CEEISA conference 2003, the ISA Annual Convention 2004, the ECPR Joint Session of Workshops 2004, and the ECPR SGIR Meeting 2004 have helped to shape and refine the arguments presented. We also thank Apostolos Agnantopoulos for his editorial assistance. This article builds on a research project on “The EU and Border Conflicts: The Impact of Integration and Association” (EUBorderConf), funded by a grant from the European Union's Fifth Framework Programme (SERD-2002-00144), with additional funding by the British Academy. See also 〈http://www.euborderconf.bham.ac.uk〉 for further information.

The Rational Design project is impressive on its own terms. However, it does not address other approaches relevant to the design of international institutions. To facilitate comparison I survey two “contrast spaces” around it. The first shares the project's central question—What explains institutional design?—but addresses alternative explanations of two types: rival explanations and explanations complementary but deeper in the causal chain. The second contrast begins with a different question: What kind of knowledge is needed to design institutions in the real world? Asking this question reveals epistemological differences between positive social science and institutional design that can be traced to different orientations toward time. Making institutions is about the future and has an intrinsic normative element. Explaining institutions is about the past and does not necessarily have this normative dimension. To avoid “driving with the rearview mirror” we need two additional kinds of knowledge beyond that developed in this volume, knowledge about institutional effectiveness and knowledge about what values to pursue. As such, the problem of institutional design is a fruitful site for developing a broader and more practical conception of social science that integrates normative and positive concerns.

Democratic nations have long struggled to set the proper balance between individual freedom and government control. The rise of digital communications networks, market integration, and international terrorism has transformed many national civil liberties issues into important international debates. The European Union was among the first jurisdictions to manage these new transnational civil liberties with the adoption of a data privacy directive in 1995. The directive substantially expanded privacy protection within Europe and had far-reaching consequences internationally. While international relations scholars have paid considerable attention to the global ramifications of these rules, research has not yet explained the origins of the European data privacy directive. Given the resistance from the European Commission, powerful member states, and industry to their introduction, the adoption of supranational rules presents a striking empirical puzzle. This article conducts a structured evaluation of conventional approaches to European integration—liberal intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism—against the historical record and uncovers an alternative driver: transgovernmental actors. These transgovernmental actors are endowed with power resources—expertise, delegated political authority, and network ties—that they employ to promote their regional policy goals. This article uses the historical narrative of the data privacy directive to explain the origins of a critical piece of international civil liberties legislation and to advance a theoretical discussion about the role of transgovernmental actors as policy entrepreneurs within the multilevel structure of the European Union.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 99th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 28–31 August 2003. I would like to thank David Bach, Tim Büthe, Burkard Eberlein, Pat Egan, Henry Farrell, Orfeo Fioretos, Jane Gingrich, Virginia Haufler, Jonah Levy, Kate McNamara, Sophie Meunier, Craig Pollack, Mark Pollack, Elliot Posner, Kathryn Sikkink, Wolfgang Streeck, Steve Weber, Nick Ziegler, and John Zysman for extensive comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Funding for this research was provided by the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, Germany.

Independent domestic courts play important roles in enforcing international human rights agreements, thereby providing a mechanism by which international institutions can affect government policy. Yet this enforcement power is constrained not only by independence but also by the courts' ability to overcome information problems. Domestic courts' enforcement power depends on information in two ways: the costs of producing legally admissible evidence of abuses and the applicable legal standards of proof. When countries ratify international agreements, judicial enforcement can improve government practices when evidence-production costs and standards of proof are low, but not otherwise. With respect to personal integrity rights violations, evidence is especially difficult to obtain, and standards of proof are high, meaning that the courts will not be able to constrain government practices. By contrast, evidence-production costs and standards of proof are lower for other civil rights violations, so courts will be able to prosecute offenders and bring governments into line with their international commitments. Consistent with this theory, I find that commitments to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) have significantly improved governments' respect for the freedoms of speech, association, assembly, and religion. With respect to personal integrity rights, however, I find that commitments to the ICCPR have not improved government practices.

How can one explain cross-national differences in innovative activity across the industrialized democracies? In this article, I examine the “varieties of capitalism” (VOC) response to this question. VOC theory predicts that societies with liberal-market economies will direct their inventive activity toward radical technological change, while societies with coordinated-market economies will direct their inventive activity toward incremental technological change. I find that these predictions are not supported by the empirical data, and that the evidence offered by VOC proponents depends heavily on the inclusion of a major outlier, the United States, in the class of liberal-market economies. My empirical investigation includes simple patent counts, patents weighted by forward citations, and scholarly publications (both simple counts and citations-weighted). I analyze data covering all of the VOC countries over the course of several decades, little of which reveals the innovative patterns predicted by VOC scholars.For their excellent insights, critiques, and encouragement I gratefully thank Thomas Cusack, Tracy Gabridge, Michael Brewster Hawes, Derek Hill, Daniel K. Johnson, Chappel Lawson, Mark Lewis, Benedicta Marzinotto, Andrew Miller, Michael Piore, Jonathan Rodden, Herman Schwartz, James Snyder, David Soskice, Edward Steinfeld, Scott Stern, Dan Winship, the editors at International Organization, and two anonymous reviewers.

State emergence is an essential dynamic of the international system, yet international relations scholars pay it little attention. Their oversight is all the more unfortunate because international politics ultimately determine which aspiring system members will succeed in becoming new states. Existing models of state emergence rely exclusively on internal or domestic-level explanations. However, the international system is inherently social; therefore any aspiring state's membership also depends on the acceptance of its peers. I present a novel, international-level model of state birth that suggests state leaders should use decisions regarding new members strategically to advance their own interests, not passively abide by domestic factors. I test this argument using a new data set on secessionism and Great Power recognition (1931–2000). I find that external politics have important, underappreciated effects on state emergence. Furthermore, acknowledging the politics of recognition's centrality to state birth alters our understanding of civil conflict dynamics and conflict resolution and suggests important implications for system-wide stability.

The decade since the formation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957 has been marked by an impressive growth of theorizing about the causes of international regional integration in Europe and in other parts of the world. However, differences in approach to conceptualization and measurement of the dependent variable—integration—have led to two kinds of problems. First, it is difficult to relate the concepts of different authors to each other, and to a certain extent integration theorists have “talked past each other”. In other instances where theorists have indeed confronted each other, such as in the controversy over the current condition of the EEC (described below), differences in conceptualization have made the dispute unnecessarily difficult to resolve.

The domestic politics of great powers significantly influence the fate of such multilateral regimes at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Unless great powers can make credible commitments to support those regimes, few countries will offer more than token support. Domestic political constraints may bind national leaders to good faith adherence to multilateral regimes even if international circumstances do not compel adherence. Domestic politics also influence the ability of other countries to monitor national adherence to agreements. Case studies of U.S. and Japanese responses to multilateral regimes show how the nature of the national electoral system, the division of powers in the government, and the transparency of the national political system influence credibility and lead to special features of multilateral economic and security regimes.

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 any field of scholarly inquiry it is recognized that we must describe before we can hope toexplain. That is, we cannot account for the incidence of a certain class of events or conditions until we have identified and described those particular phenomena. If we agree that the current state of theory in the field of international organization leaves much to be desired, this fact may be partly due to our violation of this principle. Whether we deal with all international organizations over a lengthy period of time or a smaller subset based on such inclusion criteria as function or time period and whether we treat such organizations as the dependent, intervening, or independent variable, it is essential that we first acquire the data by which such organizations can be described. The major purpose of this article is to report the results of a first systematic effort to generate this data, so that we may move on in a cumulative fashion toward the empirical testing of propositions, models, or theories in which international organization is a major variable.

One of the most prominent characteristics of multilateral organizations is that they do not “spring forth full blown”; they grow. Although this is well known, relatively few attempts have been made to explain it at a general level or to explore its implications. In this paper we show why states that desire to create a multilateral organization or agreement might be attracted to a strategy that involves admitting potential members sequentially based on their preferences. Such a “sequential construction” strategy can generate an unusual kind of structure-induced equilibrium that dramatically mitigates the breadth-depth trade-off and increases the level of cooperation a multilateral is able to attain. We evaluate these claims with data drawn from the history of the European Union and twenty environmental multilaterals.

Regime type has opposing effects on terrorism. If a regime constrains the executive branch, then terrorism may be more prevalent. If, however, a regime allows all viewpoints to be represented, then grievances may be held in check, resulting in less terrorism. Regimes that value constituents’ lives and property will also act to limit attacks. We formulate a game-theoretic model, containing a terrorist group and targeted government, that captures these opposing forces and supports a nonlinear relationship between regime type and terrorism. This model indicates how diverse samples in the literature can result in different relationships between regime type and terrorism. Seldom does it support the positive relationship that is prevalent in the terrorism literature. We apply a large variety of empirical techniques to show that regime type has a robust inverted U-shaped impact on various terrorism measures. Foreign policy variables (e.g., alliance with the United States) are not a robust influence on terrorism.

This article examines the effects of party politics and presidential election cycles on U.S. recourse to force abroad. I analyze a game-theoretic model to generate predictions about these effects. In the unique time-consistent equilibrium outcome of the one-shot game, policy varies across political parties. In a subgame–perfect equilibrium outcome of the repeated game, the use of force is invariant to the partisan composition of government. In neither case does policy respond to the electoral cycle.

An empirical analysis supports the predictions of the repeated game. Between 1870 and 1992, U.S. recourse to force abroad responds neither to partisan politics nor to the domestic political calendar. It responds only to changes in U.S. power status and to the advent of general wars.

Why do armed groups recruit large numbers of children as fighters, often coercively? The international community has tried to curb these crimes by shaming and punishing leaders who commit them—in short, making the crimes costlier. Are these policies effective and sufficient? The answer lies in more attention to the strategic interaction between rebel leaders and recruits. We adapt theories of industrial organization to rebellious groups and show how, being less able fighters, children are attractive recruits if and only if they are easier to intimidate, indoctrinate, and misinform than adults. This ease of manipulation interacts with the costliness of war crimes to influence rebel leaders' incentives to coerce children into war. We use a case study and a novel survey of former child recruits in Uganda to illustrate this argument and provide hard evidence not only that children are more easily manipulated in war, but also how—something often asserted but never demonstrated. Our theory, as well as a new “cross-rebel” data set, also support the idea that costliness matters: foreign governments, international organizations, diasporas, and local populations can discourage child recruitment by withholding resources or punishing offenders (or, conversely, encourage these crimes by failing to act). But punishing war crimes has limitations, and can only take us so far. Children's reintegration opportunities must be at least as great as adults' (something that demobilization programs sometimes fail to do). Also, indoctrination and misinformation can be directly influenced. We observe grassroots innovations in Uganda that could be models for the prevention and curbing of child soldiering and counterinsurgency generally.

In response to corruption and inefficient state institutions in recipient countries, some foreign aid donors outsource the delivery of aid to nonstate development actors. Other donor governments continue to support state management of aid, seeking to strengthen recipient states. These cross-donor differences can be attributed in large measure to different national orientations about the appropriate role of the state in public service delivery. Countries that place a high premium on market efficiency (for example, the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden) will outsource aid delivery in poorly governed recipient countries to improve the likelihood that aid reaches the intended beneficiaries of services. In contrast, states whose political economies emphasize a strong state in service provision (for example, France, Germany, Japan) continue to support state provision. This argument is borne out by a variety of tests, including statistical analysis of dyadic time-series cross-section aid allocation data and individual-level survey data on a cross-national sample of senior foreign aid officials. To understand different aid policies, one needs to understand the political economies of donors.

The effects of financial capital mobility on monetary policy autonomy are relatively well understood, but the importance of particular monetary regimes in distinct national-institutional settings is not. This article is a theoretical and empirical exploration of the effects of monetary policy regimes on unemployment in different national wage-bargaining settings. Based on a rational expectations, two-stage game of the interaction between the wage behavior of labor unions and the monetary policies of governments, I argue that monetary policies have real (employment) effects in all but the most decentralized bargaining systems. Specifically, in intermediately centralized bargaining systems a credible government commitment to a nonaccommodating monetary policy rule will deter militant wage behavior with salutary effects on unemployment. In highly centralized systems, by contrast, restrictive monetary policies will clash with unions' pursuit of wage-distributive goals and produce inferior employment performance. Only in highly fragmented bargaining systems is money “neutral” in the sense that employment performance is unaffected by monetary regimes. The model has clear consequences for the optimal design of central banks and collective bargaining arrangements and suggests new ways to study institutional change (hereunder the causal effect of increasingly globalized capital markets). The argument is supported by pooled time-series data for fifteen OECD countries over a twenty-one-year period.

Why has the literature on Asian development not addressed the issue of money politics in South Korea? How can we reconcile the view of an efficient developmental state in South Korea before 1997 with reports of massive corruption and inefficiency in that same country in 1998 and 1999? Politics is central to the answer. In this study I make two arguments. First, money politics was extensive in South Korea both during and after the high-growth era. Second, political—not economic—considerations dominated policymaking. This study explains both past and present and compares the patterns of money politics in the early post-independence era with those that arose after the democratic transition in 1987. While during the Park era a balance of power between businessmen and politicians kept corruption from spinning out of control, the transition to democracy altered the basic business-state relationship, allowing business to exert greater influence over policy decisions. The political hypothesis advanced in this study suggests a new direction for our research about the developmental state.

Oil-exporting states, or petrostates, engage in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) at a much higher rate on average than nonpetrostates. Why is this so? Further, what explains the variation among the petrostates in adopting aggressive foreign policies and engaging in MIDs on that basis? This article develops a theory that proposes that revolutionary petrostates have a higher propensity to launch MIDs than comparable nonpetrostates. This theory is tested with statistical analysis using a new quantitative data set that identifies revolutionary governments in the period 1945–2001. The results show that petro-revolutionary governments constitute a special threat to international peace and security. This evidence of resource-backed aggression challenges the conventional view of petrostates as the targets of international competition for resources.