Multilateralism characterizes, to varying degrees, patterns of interaction among states and the formal organizations they construct. The utility of multilateral norms or organizations varies with the type of cooperation problem states confront. Thus, the functional logic of international cooperation leads to hypotheses about the conditions under which the institution of multilateralism may be a feasible and efficient solution, as in coordination problems, and those under which it will not, as in collaboration problems. Within these constraints, powerful states choose institutions that will serve their interests, with multilateral arrangements becoming more attractive as the future is valued more highly. Multilateral institutions should be stable in circumstances of changing distributions of power, relative to more hierarchical institutions. The vulnerability of patterns of international cooperation to various exogenous changes depends on the type of strategic interaction underlying state behavior.

This article reviews recent contributions to International Relations (IR) that engage the substantive concerns of historical institutionalism and explicitly and implicitly employ that tradition's analytical features to address fundamental questions in the study of international affairs. It explores the promise of this tradition for new research agendas in the study of international political development, including the origin of state preferences, the nature of governance gaps, and the nature of change and continuity in the international system. The article concludes that the analytical and substantive profiles of historical institutionalism can further disciplinary maturation in IR, and it proposes that the field be more open to the tripartite division of institutional theories found in other subfields of Political Science.

How do domestic political institutions affect the way states interact in international crises? In the last decade we have witnessed an explosion of interest in this question, thanks largely to the well-known claim that democratic states do not fight wars with one another. Work on the “democratic peace” has generated a number of theoretical arguments about how practices, values, and institutions associated with democracy might generate distinctive outcomes. Although the level of interest in this topic has focused much-needed attention on the interaction between domestic and international politics, the proliferation of competing explanations for a single observation is not entirely desirable. Progress in this area requires that researchers devise tests not only to support different causal stories but also to discriminate between them.

Why do actors in international society succeed in forming institutional arrangements or regimes to cope with some transboundary problems but fail to do so in connection with other, seemingly similar, problems? This article employs a threefold strategy to make progress toward answering this question. The first section prepares the ground by identifying and critiquing the principal models embedded in the existing literature on regime formation, and the second section articulates an alternative model, called institutional bargaining. The third section employs this alternative model to derive some hypotheses about the determinants of success in institutional bargaining and uses these hypotheses, in a preliminary way, to illuminate the process of regime formation in international society. To lend empirical content to the argument, the article focuses throughout on problems relating to natural resources and the environment.

Plans for the European Monetary Union (EMU) are based on the conventional postulate that increasing the independence of the central bank can reduce inflation without any real economic effects. However, the theoretical and empirical bases for this claim rest on models of the economy that make unrealistic information assumptions and omit institutional variables other than the central bank. When signaling problems between the central bank and other actors in the political economy are considered, we find that the character of wage bargaining conditions the impact of central bank independence by rendering the signals between the bank and the bargainers more or less effective. Greater central bank independence can reduce inflation without major employment effects where bargaining is coordinated, but it can bring higher levels of unemployment where bargaining is less coordinated. Thus, currency unions like the EMU may require higher levels of unemployment to control inflation than their proponents envisage. They will have costs as well as benefits, and these will be unevenly distributed among and within the member nations, depending on the changes they induce in the status of the bank and of wage coordination.

Students and practitioners of international politics have traditionally concentrated their attention on relationships between states. The state, regarded as an actor with purposes and power, is the basic unit of action; its main agents are the diplomat and soldier. The interplay of govern-mental policies yields the pattern of behavior that students of international politics attempt to understand and that practitioners attempt to adjust to or control. Since force, violence, and threats thereof are at the core of this interplay, the struggle for power, whether as end or necessary means, is the distinguishing mark of politics among nations. Most political scientists and many diplomats seem to accept this view of reality, and a state-centric view of world affairs prevails.

This article moves from deconstruction to reconstruction in research methodology. It proposes pragmatism as a way to escape from epistemological deadlock. We first show that social scientists are mistaken in their hope to obtain warranted knowledge through traditional scientific methods. We then show that pragmatism has grown from tacit commonsense to an explicit item on the agenda of the international relations discipline. We suggest that a coherent pragmatic approach consists of two elements: the recognition of knowledge generation as a social and discursive activity, and the orientation of research toward the generation of useful knowledge. To offer a concrete example of what pragmatic methodology can look like, we propose the research strategy of abduction. We assess various forms of research design to further elucidate how pragmatic research works in practice.

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.

In an earlier article published in this journal Ernst Haas and this author suggested a set of strategic “background conditions,” “conditions at the time of initiation,” and “process conditions” intended (hypothetically) to assess the political consequences of an initial agreement to lower or remove mutual barriers to the movement of productive factors.

Students of comparative politics have long acknowledged the importance of such institutional factors as electoral systems, parliamentary versus presidential rule, and the strength of parties; but they have either regarded the institutions as given or have explained them entirely in domestic terms (associating proportional representation, for example, with the intensity of social cleavages). In economically advanced democracies, however, these institutional aspects can be plausibly linked to dependence on trade: proportional representation, the parliamentary system, strong parties, and large electoral districts have “survival value” for developed democracies exposed to trade. That the recently revived agitation for proportional representation in the United Kingdom has been cast explicitly in terms of economic necessity and dependence on trade adds force to this argument, and suggests the need for further historical research on other cases of institutional adaptation and change.

The emergence of scientific evidence that emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were depleting the stratospheric ozone layer prompted an epistemic community of atmospheric scientists and concerned policymakers to push for regulations regarding CFC use. Members of the transnational epistemic community played a primary role in gathering information, disseminating it to governments and CFC manufacturers, and helping them formulate international, domestic, and industry policies regarding CFC consumption and production. Community members contributed to the timing and stringency of CFC regulations through a combination of strategies ranging from the persuasion of individuals to the capture of various decision-making channels. Most important, by influencing the actions of the United States and DuPont, the largest producer of CFCs, the epistemic community changed the external environment in which policy decisions were made by other governments and firms.

During the nineteenth century, states routinely defeated insurgent foes. Over the twentieth century, however, this pattern reversed itself, with states increasingly less likely to defeat insurgents or avoid meeting at least some of their demands. What accounts for this pattern of outcomes in counterinsurgency (COIN) wars? We argue that increasing mechanization within state militaries after World War I is primarily responsible for this shift. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, modern militaries possess force structures that inhibit information collection among local populations. This not only complicates the process of sifting insurgents from noncombatants but increases the difficulty of selectively applying rewards and punishment among the fence-sitting population. Modern militaries may therefore inadvertently fuel, rather than deter, insurgencies. We test this argument with a new data set of 286 insurgencies (1800–2005) and a paired comparison of two U.S. Army divisions in Iraq (2003–2004). We find that higher levels of mechanization, along with external support for insurgents and the counterinsurgent's status as an occupier, are associated with an increased probability of state defeat. By contrast, we find only partial support for conventional power- and regime-based explanations, and no support for the view that rough terrain favors insurgent success.

Despite widespread recognition that aggregated summary statistics on international conflict and cooperation miss most of the complex interactions among nations, the vast majority of scholars continue to employ annual, quarterly, or (occasionally) monthly observations. Daily events data, coded from some of the huge volume of news stories produced by journalists, have not been used much for the past two decades. We offer some reason to change this practice, which we feel should lead to considerably increased use of these data. We address advances in event categorization schemes and software programs that automatically produce data by “reading” news stories without human coders. We design a method that makes it feasible, for the first time, to evaluate these programs when they are applied in areas with the particular characteristics of international conflict and cooperation data, namely event categories with highly unequal prevalences, and where rare events (such as highly conflictual actions) are of special interest. We use this rare events design to evaluate one existing program, and find it to be as good as trained human coders, but obviously far less expensive to use. For large-scale data collections, the program dominates human coding. Our new evaluative method should be of use in international relations, as well as more generally in the field of computational linguistics, for evaluating other automated information extraction tools. We believe that the data created by programs similar to the one we evaluated should see dramatically increased use in international relations research. To facilitate this process, we are releasing with this article data on 3.7 million international events, covering the entire world for the past decade.

The bargaining power model of HC–MNC (host country–multinational corporation) interaction conceives of economic nationalism in terms of rational self-interest and assumes both inherent conflict and convergent objectives. In extractive industries, there is strong evidence that outcomes are a function of relative bargaining power and that as power shifts to developing HCs over time, the bargain obsolesces. A cross-national study of the bargaining model, using data from 563 subsidiaries of U.S. manufacturing firms in forty-nine developing countries, indicates that while the bargaining framework is an accurate model of MNC–host country relationships, manufacturing is not characterized by the inherent, structurally based, and secular obsolescence that is found in the natural resource industries. Shifts in bargaining power to HCs may take place when technology is mature and global integration limited. In industries characterized by changing technologies and the spread of global integration, the bargain will obsolesce very slowly and the relative power of MNCs may even increase over time.

To what extent can the European Court of Justice, an international court, make decisions that go against the interests of European Union member states? Neofunctionalist accounts imply that because the Court is a legal body it has vast political autonomy from the member states, whereas neorealist accounts imply that because member states can sanction the ECJ, the Court has no significant political autonomy. Neither theory can explain why the Court, which was once politically weak and did not stray far from the interests of European governments, now boldly rules against their interests. In explaining how the Court escaped member state control, this article develops a general hypothesis of the autonomy of the ECJ, focusing on how differing time horizons of political and judicial actors, support for the Court within the national judiciaries, and decision-making rules at the supranational level limit the member states' ability to control the Court.

Why do policymakers consistently employ economic sanctions even though scholars consider them an ineffective tool of statecraft? Game-theoretic models of economic coercion suggest the success rate may be understated because of selection effects. When the targeted country prefers conceding to incurring the cost of sanctions, it has an incentive to acquiesce before the imposition of sanctions. The bulk of successful coercion episodes should therefore end with sanctions threatened but not imposed. This contradicts the recent literature on sanctions, which assumes that sanctions rarely, if ever, work at generating significant concessions from the targeted country and are imposed for domestic or symbolic political reasons. If the game-theoretic argument is correct, the crucial cases to study are those in which coercion is threatened but not implemented. A statistical analysis of data on sanctions in pursuit of economic or regulatory goals strongly supports the gametheoretic argument. These results suggest that the significance of economic coercion has been undervalued in the study of statecraft and international relations more generally.

The idea of international society is an essential element in the study of international relations. International society is the core concept of the English school and has not yet been systematically integrated with American-originated structural realism and regime theory. This article brings together these three bodies of theory and shows how they complement and strengthen each other. It uses structural realism to show that international society is, like balance of power, a natural product of anarchic international relations and not, as some in the English school assume, only a result of exceptional historical circumstances. This line of analysis establishes definitional criteria for international society that enable a clear boundary to be drawn between international systems with and without international societies. It also shows how state-based international society relates to individual-based world society and supports an argument that in advanced systems, this relationship becomes complementary, not contradictory. The resulting theoretical synthesis provides an essential historical and political-legal foundation for regime theory, showing that international society is both the intellectual forebear and the necessary condition for the development of regimes. Connection strengthens all three bodies of theory and opens up useful channels that connect realist and liberal thinking. One result is that international society can be used both to conceptualize the complexities of a contemporary global international system, with its network of regimes ordered in terms of concentric circles, and to sketch out a policy-relevant research agenda for understanding it.

Behavioral, institutional, and discursive analyses of the causal effects of ideas on policies present various difficulties. Meaning-oriented behavioralism is hampered by its reliance on statistical associations and quasi-experimentation to make causal claims. Ideational institutionalism avoids these problems by focusing on institutional causal mechanisms. However, these mechanisms suffer from other problems and need to be complemented by an analysis of ideational causal mechanisms of capacities. Broadly construed “discursive” approaches, meanwhile, present important analyses of these ideational capacities but unfortunately routinely neglect their causal effects on policies. These dilemmas suggest that ideational analysis can be enhanced if discursivists attend more closely to the causal effects of ideational factors, while behavioralists and institutionalists pay greater attention to interpretive understanding, intersubjective meanings, and discursive practices. In so doing, opposing analytical approaches might engage in fruitful dialogue, or at the very least raise the level of their “third debate.”

Most intergovernmentalist analyses of European integration focus on treaty bargaining among European Union member governments. Recent articles also have examined everyday decision making through power index analysis, an approach that asserts that a government's ability to influence policy is a function of all possible coalitions in the Council of Ministers to which it is pivotal. This approach suffers from two major weaknesses. First, it fails to take into account the policy preferences of governments; it overestimates the influence of governments holding extreme preferences and underestimates that of more centrist governments. Second, power index analysis fails to consider the important roles of the Commission of the European Communities and the European Parliament in legislative processes. Today's procedures affect the mix of agenda-setting and veto power, and this has systematic effects on policy outcomes. If intergovernmentalism is to explain choices made during treaty rounds, it must take into account these legislative dynamics.