Why do leading actors invest in costly projects that they expect will not yield appreciable military or economic benefits? We identify a causal process in which concerns about legitimacy produce attempts to secure dominance in arenas of high symbolic value by investing wealth and labor into unproductive (in direct military and economic terms) goods and performances. We provide evidence for our claims through a comparative study of the American Project Apollo and the Ming Dynasty's treasure fleets. We locate our argument within a broader constructivist and practice-theoretic understanding of hierarchy and hegemony. We build on claims that world politics is a sphere of complex social stratification by viewing constituent hierarchies in terms of social fields. Our specific theory and broader framework, we contend, provide tools for understanding the workings of power politics beyond military and economic competition.

One of the strengths of Robert Putnam's two-level bargaining game model is its ability to capture how international negotiations make it possible for negotiators to pursue synergistic strategies aimed at improving their prospects for a favorable deal by reshaping politics in both their own and their counterparts' domestic arenas. While reaffirming the utility of this approach, this article argues that Putnam describes only some of the synergistic strategies available to negotiators. In addition to “reverberation” and “synergistic linkage,” a negotiator can also reshape politics in his or her counterpart's domestic arena in two other ways: (1) by transforming decision making in ways that expand elite participation and bring the weight of public opinion to bear on policies that were previously dictated by small groups of privileged domestic actors and (2) by influencing the way in which policy alternatives are considered in the decisionmaking process. Through an examination of the Structural Impediments Initiative, a set of negotiations through which the United States applied a great deal of foreign pressure (gaiaisu) on Japan, the article makes the case for the above modifications to the Putnam model and argues that “participation expansion” strategies are most likely to be successful when involvement in decision making (before foreign intervention) is limited and latent support for foreign demands exists outside the privileged elite, while “alternative specification” is most likely to work when opportunities exist to link favored policy proposals to already recognized domestic problems.

Our experience with COVID-19 has yet to show that either democracies or autocracies are unambiguously better at dealing with this threat. What the pandemic has instead demonstrated is that these two forms of government each have specific strengths and weaknesses when it comes to dealing with external emergencies. In autocracies centralization of power allows for decisive action, but their ability to maintain secrecy means that they can also suppress information and ignore a problem. In a democracy greater transparency makes it hard to cover up a threat, but the decentralization of power that is inherent to a democracy can lead to a slow and potentially ineffective response. Using both current and historical comparisons between China and western countries, I show that these different patterns have deep roots, dating back a thousand years or more. I then consider three alternative proposals for democracies to be able to act more decisively: allowing for rule by decree, devolving responsibility to localities, and investing in preventative state capacity. History shows that the latter of these three is the safest and most effective strategy, but for it to work voters must reward politicians for investing in prevention. Unfortunately, this reward cannot be assumed.

For years, the United States has imposed economic sanctions to compel countries to alter their behavior. An important concern is whether government sanctions influence private foreign direct investment (FDI) decisions, the largest source of foreign capital. In the first study to assess empirically the relationship between economic sanctions and FDI, we consider whether U.S. sanctions influence U.S. FDI inflows into targeted countries. Using panel data for 171 countries from 1965 to 2000, we find strong evidence that U.S investors pull out of countries targeted for U.S sanctions prior to their imposition. This disinvestment is not permanent and investment tends to return after the sanctions are imposed. The results provide support for FDI studies that show the effect of risk on investor decision making.

The “new” trade theory and standard trade theory make different predictions about the composition and distribution of trade flows. Empirical evidence suggests that an increasing share of international trade consists of differentiated products, a consequence of increasing returns to scale. Nonetheless, the existing political science literature typically assumes that the conditions of standard theory hold. As such, the literature ignores the dynamic-inconsistency problem that imperfect markets can create. In doing so, it also ignores the fact that imperfect markets can shift the political prerequisites of open international markets. In this article we examine these shifts. We argue that alliances can support an optimal level of trade when scale economies rather than differences in relative factor endowments motivate it. Our empirical results support this argument, indicating that alliances exert a stronger influence on trade in goods produced under conditions of increasing rather than constant returns to scale.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston; the 2002 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New Orleans; and seminars at the University of Chicago (PIPES), the University of Colorado, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. For helpful comments and suggestions, we are grateful to participants in these seminars and to Regina Baker, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, William Clark, Benjamin Cohen, Christina Davis, Eric Fisher, Avery Goldstein, Stephen Kobrin, Lisa Martin, Patrick McDonald, Helen Milner, Robert Powell, Dan Reiter, Anne Sartori, Branislav Slantchev, and Beth Yarbrough. We are also grateful to Regina Baker and Patrick McDonald for research assistance.

Drawing on the analytical framework developed by Barbara Koremenos, Charles Lipson, and Duncan Snidal in the Rational Design project, I seek to shed light on the striking institutional differences among the various methods of international commercial dispute resolution for private parties. These methods include recourse to public courts and more frequently to private international courts, such as the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce or the London Court of International Arbitration, as well as recourse to so-called ad hoc arbitration and alternative dispute-resolution techniques, such as conciliation and mediation. The key institutional dimensions along which these methods of international dispute resolution vary are (1) procedural and adaptive flexibility, and (2) centralization of procedural safeguards and information collection. I explain why different methods of international commercial dispute resolution are selected. I argue that these methods respond to the varying institutional needs of different types of disputes and disputants. Such needs can be explained in terms of the severity of the enforcement problem, uncertainty about the preferences or behavior of contractual partners, and uncertainty about the state of the world.

For the time being, at least, survey data is relevant to the study of regional integration chiefly insofar as it gives an indication of the influence of the public (and various elite groups) on the decisions of the respective national governments—and vice versa. As integration progresses in given regions our focus may change, and we may become primarily interested in the degree to which given groups direct support or demands toward supranational institutions. But for the present the basic question seems to be:

To what extent do public preferences constitute an effective influence on a given set of national decisionmakers, encouraging them to make decisions which increase (or diminish) regional integration?

Status has long been implicated as a critical value of states and leaders in international politics. However, decades of research on the link between status and conflict have yielded divergent findings, and little evidence of a causal relationship. I attempt to resolve this impasse by shifting the focus from status to relative status concerns in building a theory of status from the ground up, beginning with its behavioral microfoundations. I build on and extend previous work through an experimental study of status threats and the escalation of commitment, operationalized here as a new behavioral escalation task using real financial incentives and framed around a narrative of war and peace. I utilize a unique sample of high-profile political and military leaders from the Senior Executive Fellow (SEF) program at the Harvard Kennedy School, as well as a group of demographically matched control subjects, allowing me to evaluate the moderating effect of power on status concerns while also addressing typical concerns about external validity in IR experiments. I find strong evidence that the fear of losing status impedes decision making and increases the tendency to “throw good money after bad,” but that power aids decision making by buffering high-power subjects against the worst effects of status loss.

Why do some decision makers prefer big multilateral agreements while others prefer cooperation in small clubs? Does enforcement encourage or deter institutional cooperation? We use experiments drawn from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology—along with a substantive survey focused on international trade—to illustrate how two behavioral traits (patience and strategic reasoning) of individuals who play key roles in negotiating and ratifying an international treaty shape their preferences for how treaties are designed and whether they are ratified. Patient subjects were more likely to prefer treaties with larger numbers of countries (and larger long-term benefits), as were subjects with the skill to anticipate how others will respond over multiple iterations of strategic games. The presence of an enforcement mechanism increased subjects' willingness to ratify treaties; however, strategic reasoning had double the effect of adding enforcement to a trade agreement: more strategic subjects were particularly likely to favor ratifying the agreement. We report these results for a sample of 509 university students and also show how similar patterns are revealed in a unique sample of ninety-two actual US policy elites. Under some conditions certain types of university student convenience samples can be useful for revealing elite-dominated policy preferences—different types of people in the same situation may prefer to approach decision-making tasks and reason through trade-offs in materially different ways.

Do the macroeconomic priorities of citizens differ across countries? If so, what accounts for this variation and what are its consequences for explanations of the choice of monetary institutions, macroeconomic policy, and international monetary cooperation? This article uses survey data from twenty advanced economies to examine individual preferences about macroeconomic priorities. The analysis establishes three key findings. First, the results suggest that economic context, defined by inflation and unemployment performance, has a substantial impact on the public's economic objectives in a way that is broadly consistent with the specification of utility/loss functions in the theoretical political economy literature. Second, the results suggest that there is significant cross-country variation in inflation aversion, controlling for economic context. Third, some of this variation is accounted for by national-level factors affecting the aggregate costs of inflation and unemployment. These results have significant implications for optimal monetary policymaking, the explanation of variation in economic outcomes, and for accounts of the choice of institutional frameworks for policymaking.I thank the Bank of England, the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies for research support, and Jim Alt, Andrew Bailey, Bill Bernhard, Lawrence Broz, John Freeman, Jeff Frieden, Jim Granato, Shigeo Hirano, David Lake, Jeff Lax, Simon Price, Rose Razaghian, Ron Rogowski, David Stasavage, Gabriel Sterne, Mike Tomz, Jim Vreeland, the editor, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. All views expressed are those of the author and do not represent those of the Bank of England.

The WHO/UNICEF International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes was passed by the 1981 World Health Assembly. Subsequent arrangements between the Nestlé Corporation and its nongovernmental critics for the implementation of the code indicate what is possible within the normative framework of an emerging regime on investment and transnational corporations. In the baby food case the context was particularly positive. A high level of consensual knowledge, the successful strategies of nongovernmental organizations, the susceptibility of the involved industries to pressure, the brevity of deliberations, and the conducive atmosphere of the international organization setting all helped negotiators to develop a detailed code of marketing. Actions inside and outside the UN system combined to delegitimize commonly accepted practices, modify global marketing schemes, and alter national health care practices. In other issue-areas, however, such as Pharmaceuticals, the same positive convergence of factors does not yet exist, and the achievement of equally precise codes will be more difficult.

In this article I examine how a weak international law can be created despite the presence of a strong norm, and I use weak law to probe the relationship between social and legal norms. International law dealing with mercenaries is notoriously flawed. These flaws have been attributed to the idea that state interest (or lack of interest) led to the development of intentionally weak law. In fact, ineffective anti-mercenary law is the result of the influence of norms. A strong norm against mercenary use has led states to devise a definition that indicated what they found problematic about mercenaries, and differentiated mercenaries from other actors. This definition followed the anti-mercenary norm but created a number of loopholes, which were made worse by the fact that commitment to the norm was so strong that states were unable to make adjustments necessary to create more effective law. The development of the law against mercenaries was further undermined by the pressures of a competing norm. During the 1980s, creation of a UN Convention to deal with mercenaries was stymied by the fact that many states were seeking to protect the norm of state responsibility, and the conflict between this norm and the anti-mercenary norm delayed the Convention to such a degree it was superseded by events. Weak anti-mercenary law, created in the presence of a strong anti-mercenary norm, can demonstrate four things about the relationship between social and legal norms: that states advocate the creation of law because of what it is rather than what it does; that legal institutionalization is not necessarily good for the further development of a norm; that strong commitment to a norm can lead to the creation of weak law; and that social and legal norms might not differ because the latter is more effective.The author would like to thank Audrey Kurth Cronin, Guy Goodwin-Gill, Henry Shue, Adam Roberts, Henry Shue, Christine Whelan, Dominik Zaum, and the two anonymous referees, for their comments. Helpful comments were made by Joanna Harrington and Neil MacFarlane on an earlier version of this piece.

For the first time in history, international monetary relations were institutionalized after World War II as a set of legal obligations. The Articles of Agreement that formed the International Monetary Fund contain international legal obligations of the rules of good conduct for IMF members. Members were required to maintain a par value for their currency (until 1977), to use a single unified exchange-rate system, and to keep their current account free from restrictions. In this article I explore why governments committed themselves to these rules and the conditions under which they complied with their commitments. The evidence suggests that governments tended to make and keep commitments if other countries in their region did so as well. Governments also complied with their international legal commitments if the regime placed a high value on the rule of law domestically. One inference is that reputational concerns have a lot to do with international legal commitments and compliance. Countries that have invested in a strong reputation for protecting property rights are more reluctant to see it jeopardized by international law violations. Violation is more likely, however, in the face of widespread noncompliance, suggesting that compliance behavior should be understood in its regional context.

Hobbes has long been a central figure in the theory of international relations. He has also been a badly misunderstood one. While often invoked to support contemporary theories of international politics, Hobbes's thinking actually challenges rational-choice theories, the structural realism of Kenneth Waltz, and the “rationalist” approach of the English school. Indeed, the skeptical foundations of his political vision place him closer to contemporary postpositivist positions, though here, too, his views raise difficult and important questions for such a stance. In general, Hobbes's theory of international relations focuses not upon the determinations of anarchy in any conventional sense but upon issues of knowledge, ideology, and legitimacy in the construction of political orders both domestically and internationally.

How do norms influence choices in social life? Conceptual distinctions among types of norms and suggestions in the work of Hobbes, Hume, and Durkheim help us investigate in greater detail the “woolly” concept of regimes in international relations. When we disaggregate the “set of explicit and implicit norms, rules, and decisionmaking procedures” in a given issue area and focus on the conceptual links between rules, principles (norms), and actions, we gain an understanding of the role of norms in social life that is more comprehensive than the understanding provided by traditional accounts. Furthermore, placing the present regime discussion within wider philosophical traditions enables us to develop a more critical approach to the building of theory in the social sciences, since the use of norms as explanatory devices challenges the predominant positivist outlook in several important respects.

The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) of 1934 has long been heralded as a simple institutional reform with revolutionary consequences: namely, by changing the trade policymaking process in the United States, the RTAA is held responsible for the dramatic liberalization in U.S. policy beginning in the 1930s and 1940s. This article takes issue with this conventional wisdom. I argue that the standard accounts—which emphasize the importance of delegation for overcoming logrolling in Congress or for facilitating reciprocity in international trade negotiations—fail to provide an adequate explanation for just how the institutional innovation was achieved and sustained in the face of protectionist opposition. I suggest instead that trade liberalization was driven by exogenous changes in party constituencies and societal preferences that had crucial effects on congressional votes to extend the RTAA authority and liberalize trade after 1945. The preservation of the RTAA program was symptomatic rather than causal; as a consequence, it may well be abandoned in the future. The evolution of U.S. trade policy has been, and will continue to be, powerfully shaped by changes in the preferences of societal groups and in the positions taken by parties on the trade issue.

How do states resolve jurisdictional conflicts among international institutions? In many issue areas, global governance is increasingly fragmented among multiple international organizations (IOs). Existing work argues this fragmentation can undermine cooperation as different institutions adopt conflicting rules. However, this perspective overlooks the potential for interinstitutional coordination. I develop a theory of institutional deference: the acceptance of another IO's exercise of authority. By accepting rules crafted in another IO, member states can mitigate rule conflict and facilitate a division of labor within the regime complex. I use an original data set of over 2,000 IO policy documents to describe patterns of deference in the counterterrorism, intellectual property, and election-monitoring regime complexes. Empirical tests support two theoretical claims. First, institutional deference is indeed associated with a division of labor among institutions: IOs that defer to each other are more likely to focus their rule-making efforts on separate subissues. Second, deference is a strategic act that is shaped both by efficiency concerns and power politics. Statistical tests confirm that deference is used to efficiently pool resources among disparate organizations, and that IOs with weaker member states tend to defer to organizations with more powerful members.

Retributiveness and humanitarianism, predispositions that shape individuals' moral judgment and criminal punishment attitudes, should also influence their positions on war against evil-seeming states. Retributiveness should heighten support for punitive uses of military force, satisfaction from punitive wars, and threats perceived from transgressor states, while humanitarianism should have the opposite effects. Using death penalty support as a proxy measure for these values, public opinion about the 1991 and 2003 Persian Gulf wars provides evidence for a moral-punitiveness effect. Death penalty supporters were significantly more hawkish than death penalty opponents in both cases, controlling for ideology, utilitarian logic, and other potential confounders. These findings explain why foreign villains and good-versus-evil framing heighten public support for war.Earlier versions of this article were delivered at the 2003 and 2005 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association. I am grateful to Kurt Gaubatz, Daniel Geller, Paul Goren, Jon Hurwitz, Keena Lipsitz, Shoon Murray, Felicia Pratto, and International Organization's reviewers for comments on earlier drafts. Craig Enders, Keith Markus, and Cornell University Peace Studies Seminar participants gave me helpful suggestions, and Linda Skitka shared useful unpublished findings. This study benefited from a PSC-CUNY grant from the City University of New York, and Ahuva Spitz's able research assistance.

Mercenary armies went out of style in the nineteenth century; it became common sense that armies should be staffed with citizens. I argue that even though realist explanations focusing on the fighting prowess of citizen armies and sociological explanations focusing on the fit between citizen armies and prevailing ideas can rationalize this change, they cannot explain it. I examine, instead, the politics behind the new reliance on citizen armies and argue that material and ideational turmoil provided important antecedent conditions for change. Beyond this, individual states were more likely to move toward citizen armies when they had been defeated militarily and when the ruling coalition was split or indifferent about the reforms tied to citizen armies. Finally, the apparent success of citizen armies in France and then Prussia made do mestic conditions for reform easier to obtain in other countries, reinforcing the likelihood that the solution would be replicated. I conclude that the interaction between domestic politics and path dependency provides a promising source of hypotheses for explaining the conditions under which new ways of war emerge and spread.

What accounts for the development of the Arab states system from the explosive mix of Arab nationalism and sovereignty to their simultaneous existence? To understand this development, one must first examine how institutions can shape the very interests and roles of states in such a manner as to encourage the development of relatively stable expectations and shared norms; that is, regional order. This approach illuminates how inter-Arab interactions and state formation processes led to the consolidation of sovereignty and a meaning of Arab nationalism that is consistent with sovereignty. Consequently, this region highlights how sovereignty—and its lack thereof—is consequential for understanding interstate dynamics, and how different meanings of the nation have different implications for security.