The regulation of postwar international aviation markets suggests that existing approaches to international institutions cannot adequately account for important elements of international institution building. In particular, scholars have neglected how domestic politics shapes the incentives of national governments to create and maintain international institutions and the impact of domestic politics on the scope and functions of international institutions. Drawing on positive theories of regulation and the literature on property rights, I argue that national politicians use international institutions to increase the wealth available for domestic redistribution. In short, national politicians create and maintain international institutions to maximize domestic political support. I present a domestic political model that explains how, when, and why national politicians create international institutions. The model is applied to the creation of institutions governing international aviation markets in the late 1940s and the reformulation of these institutions over the past two decades.

Profound and rapid changes in the costs and risks of international trade are now widely acknowledged to be a potent source of domestic political conflict. By altering the relative prices of goods available from world markets, these changes alter the rewards that flow to different factors of production from different economic activities. These distributional consequences of changing levels of trade, in turn, alter the configuration of interests in the domestic political economy, strain existing political alignments, and enable the construction of new political coalitions. Thus, global changes in the economy, such as the transportation and telecommunications revolutions in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries or the collapse of international trade and finance during the interwar years, will have global consequences as they reverberate within and through the domestic politics of all countries that trade on world markets.

Most of the major theoretical traditions in international relations offer little advice on how costly international moral action could be accomplished. The main exception is the constructivist approach that focuses on the spread of cosmopolitan ethical beliefs through transnational interaction. While the logic of this theory does not imply any limit on the scale of goals that might be achieved, most constructivist empirical work so far has focused on relatively inexpensive moral efforts, such as food aid, and so may not identify the conditions under which states will take on much more costly moral projects. In this article, we test the constructivist theory of moral action against the record of the most costly international moral action in modern history: Britain's sixty-year effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade from 1807 to 1867. We find that the willingness of British abolitionists to accept high costs was driven less by a cosmopolitan commitment to a moral community of all people than by parochial religious imperatives to impose their moral vision on others and, especially, to reform their domestic society. Transnational influences also had no important effect. Rather, the abolitionists' success in getting the British state to enact their program was determined mainly by opportunities provided by the fragile balance of power m British domestic politics. Although testing in more cases is needed, these findings suggest that better explanations of international moral action might be provided by a type of domestic coalition politics model based on what we call “saintly logrolls.”

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.

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.

We have recently witnessed the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare. The non-use of nuclear weapons since then remains the single most important phenomenon of the nuclear age. Yet we still lack a full understanding of how this tradition arose and is maintained and of its prospects for the future. The widely cited explanation is deterrence, but this account is either wrong or incomplete. Although an element of sheer luck no doubt has played a part in this fortuitous outcome, this article argues that a normative element must be taken into account in explaining why nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. A normative prohibition on nuclear use has developed in the global system, which, although not (yet) a fully robust norm, has stigmatized nuclear weapons as unacceptable weapons of mass destruction. Without this normative stigma, there might have been more “use.” This article examines this phenomenon in the context of the nuclear experience of the United States.

The Federal Reserve System was established in 1913 to provide the public good of domestic financial system stability. Its main purpose was to safeguard the nation from banking panics and other economically costly financial disturbances. In this article, I explain the collective action behind the Federal Reserve Act by way of the joint products (selective incentives) model. The selective inducement that motivated lobbying for the Federal Reserve was the desire to internationalize usage of the U.S. dollar, a benefit restricted primarily to money-center bankers. Bankers internalized the costs of producing the Federal Reserve because the private gains associated with internationalizing the currency could not be disassociated from production of domestic financial stability. The article provides a road map of the joint products model and demonstrates empirically the supply technology that bound together the public and private goods of the Federal Reserve Act.

Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, countries have been able to choose from a variety of exchange-rate arrangements. We argue that politicians' incentives condition the choice of an exchange-rate arrangement. These incentives reflect the configuration of domestic political institutions, particularly electoral and legislative institutions. In systems where the cost of electoral defeat is high and electoral timing is exogenous, politicians will be less willing to forgo their discretion over monetary policy with a fixed exchange rate. In systems where the costs of electoral defeat are low and electoral timing is endogenous, politicians are more likely to adopt a fixed exchange-rate regime. Consequently, differences in domestic political systems can help account for variations in the choice of exchange-rate arrangements. We test this argument using constrained multinomial logit and binomial logit on a sample of twenty democracies over the period 1974–95. Domestic political institutions have a significant effect on exchange-rate regime choice, even after controlling for systemic, macroeconomic, and other political variables.

Does informal intervention by high officials of international organizations decisively influence the outcomes of multilateral negotiations? In the words of two leading international lawyers, can “faceless international bureaucrats, unelected and without power of purse or sword” really influence the decisions of powerful nation-states? Are we seeing the emergence of a “new statecraft” grounded in international networks managed by supranational political entrepreneurs?

In this article I explore the propensity of democracies to use military force when involved in international disputes. I argue that the use of force by democracies in large part results from the domestic circumstances confronting their chief executives and that those circumstances vary predictably across democracies based on the structure of their domestic institutions. For example, U.S. presidents must garner public support before elections and maintain widespread congressional support if they involve the country in long-term military conflicts. Conflicts are risky without either of these domestic prerequisites. Consider President Lyndon Johnson's decision to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Johnson and his advisors reached their decision in 1964 but waited until early 1965, after the November 1964 national election, to announce this decision publicly and implement it on the ground. President George Bush's 1990 decision to double the number of troops deployed to Kuwait and move from deterring an attack on Saudi Arabia to compelling an Iraqi withdrawal was made in a similar manner. The Bush administration decided on its new policy in early October but announced that decision only after Congress recessed and the midterm elections were completed.

International Relations scholars have vigorous theories to explain why international organizations (IOs) are created, but they have paid little attention to IO behavior and whether IOs actually do what their creators intend. This blind spot flows logically from the economic theories of organization that have dominated the study of international institutions and regimes. To recover the agency and autonomy of IOs, we offer a constructivist approach. Building on Max Weber's well-known analysis of bureaucracy, we argue that IOs are much more powerful than even neoliberals have argued, and that the same characteristics of bureaucracy that make IOs powerful can also make them prone to dysfunctional behavior. IOs are powerful because, like all bureaucracies, they make rules, and, in so doing, they create social knowledge. IOs deploy this knowledge in ways that define shared international tasks, create new categories of actors, form new interests for actors, and transfer new models of political organization around the world. However, the same normative valuation on impersonal rules that defines bureaucracies and makes them powerful in modern life can also make them unresponsive to their environments, obsessed with their own rules at the expense of primary missions, and ultimately produce inefficient and self-defeating behavior. Sociological and constructivist approaches thus allow us to expand the research agenda beyond IO creation and to ask important questions about the consequences of global bureaucratization and the effects of IOs in world politics.

Although international relations scholarship emphasizing the role of social constructs such as norms and culture has established a beachhead in the area of security studies, it has yet to take on another bastion of the rational materialist approach: studies of coercive international bargaining. Scholarship in this area, ranging from the work of Thomas Schelling to James Fearon, has long argued that bargaining outcomes reflect the material costs and benefits faced by participants in negotiations. Participants can influence outcomes, these models assume, only through tactics such as credible threats and side payments that reshape the material context of negotiations.

Previous research into endogenous trade policy has described extensively the political incentives of firms with specific assets, but no studies have shown directly that firms behave as predicted. We adopt insights from transaction costs economics to develop measures of asset specificity and to investigate how variation in these measures affects the political behavior of firms. In particular, we examine the lobbying choices of Norwegian firms in the 1980s. Given available subsidy funds from Norway's oil boom and some government decisions in the 1970s, firms with more specific assets faced potentially greater losses from adjusting to new activities in the face of competitive pressures and thus had greater incentives to lobby for subsidies to protect themselves. Joint contacting of Parliament and government on behalf of firm interests by representatives of both management and labor should be particularly likely where firms had specific assets. Data analysis shows that asset specificity, as indicated by R&D intensity and job immobility, predicts joint contacting independently of plausible alternative explanatory variables like firm size and export orientation.

The end of the Cold War has profoundly transformed Europe's security situation. Although traditional security issues remain important, the most immediate threats to security since 1989 have originated not from relations between states, but from instability and conflict within states that has threatened to spill over into the interstate arena. States' efforts to shape and control this new security environment have resulted in a unique hybrid arrangement containing elements of traditional alliances, great power concerts, state and community building, and collective security.

Scholarship on the European Community (EC) focuses particular attention on how formal voting rules and institutional reform condition decision-making outcomes. The predominant view of EC history holds that decision making remained paralyzed until institutional reforms in 1987 and 1992 restored and expanded adherence to majority voting rules, which in turn unblocked and expedited EC legislative efforts. In this study I challenge these fundamental assumptions using comprehensive data for 1974–95 and a series of quantitative assessments, including event history analysis. I show that decision making in the 1970s was anything but paralyzed, that the impact of the Luxembourg Compromise has been greatly overstated, that institutional reforms actually encumbered rather than eased the EC legislative process, and that institutional effects are mediated by the underlying distribution of member state preferences. The findings have important implications for our understanding of the history and future trajectory of European integration and highlight the applicability of standard political science theories and methods to the study of the EC.

Last year the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved the expansion of the Atlantic alliance. Whereas some advocates of enlarging NATO, particularly Eastern European leaders for whom the Soviets' iron grip is an all too recent memory, stress the extension of the alliance's traditional deterrent function, others acknowledge that Russia is in no position to reconquer its former empire. Rather, they argue that membership in NATO would stabilize the region by filling the power vacuum and eliminating the need for security competition. Traditionally a volatile area, East-Central Europe is rife with potential irredentist and ethnic conflicts, and NATO can help arbitrate and limit these disputes. Critics have denounced the move as unnecessarily provocative to Russia, and they have also decried its hefty cost. But they have not challenged the claim that alliances create zones of peace.

During the past decade, a growing number of scholars have turned to cultural approaches to account for the foreign and security policies of states. Surprisingly, however, these scholars have devoted little attention to the concept that boasts the most venerable tradition in the field of political science, that of political culture, as a possible source of state behavior. This neglect is unjustified. Like other cultural variables, political culture promises to explain phenomena that are enigmatic from the perspective of leading noncultural theories, such as neorealism. Yet it applies to a broader range of cases than do the many alternative cultural concepts, such as strategic culture and organizational culture, that have been employed. I begin by describing an important puzzle in the international relations literature that suggests the need to consider culture as a variable: the failure of neorealism to predict German security policy after unification. I then assess the various cultural approaches used in recent years to explain state behavior. After noting the similarities in these approaches, I discuss the important differences that mark them and identify the reasons for the greater utility of political culture. Finally, I illustrate the explanatory power of the political culture approach by applying it to the case of German security policy since 1990.

That domestic political economic factors are important determinants of a nation's trade barriers has been empirically well established. However, the question of how effective strategically retaliatory trade barriers are in deterring foreign protectionism has received far less systematic empirical attention. In this article we use bilateral nontariff barrier (NTB) data between the United States and five developed partner countries (Japan, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom) to systematically examine the effectiveness of strategic retaliation. We employ a simultaneous Tobit model where the home and foreign NTB levels are determined endogenously in a bilateral game. The model provides estimates of deterrence coefficients, that is, the reduction in foreign trade barriers as a result of U.S. retaliation, which we use to characterize the nature of bilateral NTB games. Our hope is that the empirical results presented here, which have realistic though controversial implications, will inform U.S. trade policy.

Because of the nature of modern weapons, significant innovations in arms technology have the potential to induce dramatic changes in the international distribution of power. Consider, for example, the “strategic defense initiative” (SDI), a program initiated by the United States in the early 1980s. Had the program been successfully completed, it might have led to a substantial devaluation of Soviet nuclear capabilities and put the United States in a very dominant position. It should not then come as a surprise that interstate rivalry, especially among super powers, often takes the form of a race for technological superiority. Mary Acland-Hood claims that although the United States and the Soviet Union together accounted for roughly half of the world's military expenditures in the early 1980s, their share of world military research and development (R&D) expenditures was about 80 percent. As further proof of the perceived importance of R&D, note that whereas the overall U.S. defense budget increased by 38 percent (from $225.1 billion to $311.6 billion in real terms) from 1981 to 1987, military R&D spending increased by 100 percent (from $20.97 billion to $41.96 billion). Moreover, before World War II military R&D absorbed on average less than 1 percent of the military expenditure of major powers, but since then it has grown to 11–13 percent. The emphasis on military technology is bound to become more pronounced in the future as R&D becomes the main arena for interstate competition.