Recent research on compliance in international regulatory regimes has argued (1) that compliance is generally quite good; (2) that this high level of compliance has been achieved with little attention to enforcement; (3) that those compliance problems that do exist are best addressed as management rather than enforcement problems; and (4) that the management rather than the enforcement approach holds the key to the evolution of future regulatory cooperation in the international system. While the descriptive findings above are largely correct, the policy inferences are dangerously contaminated by endogeneity and selection problems. A high rate of compliance is often the result of states formulating treaties that require them to do little more than they would do in the absence of a treaty. In those cases where noncompliance does occur and where the effects of selection are attenuated, both self-interest and enforcement play significant roles.

While scholars have written much about the role played by international institutions in cooperative behavior among nations, they have not examined the domestic political motives that may lie behind nations' decisions to join such organizations. Two-level games analysis provides a framework for studying domestic politics not as a constraint upon nations that enter into international agreements but as a catalyst for nations to enter into agreements. The dispute settlement procedures of the North American Free Trade Agreement and its predecessor, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, offer an empirical illustration of this point.

Security relations between states vary along a continuum from anarchic alliances to hierarchic empires. This continuum, in turn, is defined by the parties' rights of residual control. The state's choice between alternatives is explained in a theory of relational contracting as a function of the expected costs of opportunism, which decline with relational hierarchy, and governance costs, which rise with relational hierarchy. A comparison of early postwar relations between the United States and Western Europe and the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe illustrates the theory.

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.

In the last decade a growing number of developing countries have opened their financial systems by liberalizing capital flows and the rules governing the international operations of financial intermediaries. One explanation of this rush toward greater financial internationalization is that increasing interdependence generates domestic and foreign political pressures for capital account liberalization. While we find evidence for that hypothesis, we find that the proximate cause in developing countries more frequently is found in balance of payments crises. Politicians perceive that financial openness in the face of crisis can increase capital inflows by indicating to foreign investors that they will be able to liquidate their investments and by signaling government intentions to maintain fiscal and monetary discipline. The argument is explored through case studies of Chile, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Korea.

Central bank independence is associated with restrictive monetary choices that can be deflationary within fixed exchange-rate regimes. Because central banks act to counteract domestic inflation, they put a premium on domestic price stability at the expense of international monetary stability. Evidence from fifteen countries between 1925 and 1938 shows that the more independent central banks took more deflationary policies than were necessary for external adjustment. Central banks in general were more restrictive under left-wing governments than they were under more conservative regimes and often were more restrictive than required for external equilibration. This suggests that policies of independent central banks designed to enhance domestic price stability may force deflationary pressures onto other states in the system and potentially destabilize a fixed exchange-rate regime.

Over the past decade, foreign direct investment (FDI) in the United States has grown dramatically, changing the composition of many U.S. industries and bringing foreignowned firms into the domestic political process. Presumably, FDI also has affected the politics of protection, by both altering the domestic coalitions around protectionist demands and shifting the potential benefits that protectionism is likely to bring. To understand this process, we create and test a model that examines the level of inward investment and the extent to which this investment either complements or substitutes for existing import levels. Import-complementing investment, we suggest, will cause a split in protectionist demands, with local producers favoring protectionism and foreign investors pushing for free trade. Import-substituting investment, by contrast, will create convergent interests between local and foreign producers. In both cases, inward FDI reshuffles traditional alliances and demands for protection, challenging many prevailing views about protectionism in the United States.

For most of the twentieth century, international politics were dominated by World Wars I and II and by the cold war. This period of intense international security competition clearly strengthened states, increasing their scope and cohesion. However, the end of the cold war may represent a “threat trough”—a period of significantly reduced international security competition. If so, the scope and cohesion of many states may likewise change. Although this change will not be so great as to end the state or the states system, the state as we know it surely will change. Some states will disintegrate, many will cease growing in scope and may even shrink a little, and few will remain unaffected.

Hardly anyone expects public institutions to die. Yet a census reveals that fully one-third of the international governmental organizations (IGOs) in existence in 1981 had in fact become defunct by 1992. Most Eastern bloc and many regional developing country organizations vanished or became inactive. During this period a slightly larger number of new organizations was born. Not governments but other IGOs spawned most of the new offspring. Wealthy democratic countries increased their IGO memberships while poor unstable countries increasingly dropped out. This bifurcation was accompanied by greater reliance by all on a set of core universal-membership institutions dominated by Western values. Functionalism, organizational ecology, and realism each partly help us to understand these trends but leave important dynamics unexplained.

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.

Neorealist theories help explain alliance formation and longevity but have trouble explaining why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) continues to exist after the cold war. Organizational theories further our understanding by noting that organizations have strong survival instincts, yet NATO survives only as long as its members wish it to. To understand NATO's persistence after the cold war, we must turn to international institutionalist theories to explain why, contrary to neorealist expectations, NATO remains the key international security institution for its members. International institutionalist theories add the conception of NATO as part of a broad multilevel and multi-issue relationship among member states, and this broader context is necessary to explain NATO's persistence.

Voting patterns in the United National General Assembly provide an exceptionally good set of evidence for observing issues and alignments of states in international politics. We analyze those patterns in three post-cold war sessions of the General Assembly and compare them with the alignments and issues that characterized sessions during the cold war. We find new groups and alignments (with most of Eastern Europe now voting with rather than against West European positions) and a new prominence of long-term North-South issues as they now relate to questions of redefining “human security” in the post-cold war world. The predominant General Assembly division is between richer and poorer nations. Key correlates of voting with the North are wealth, democracy, and proportionately low levels of trade with the United States.

Making credible commitments is a formidable problem for states in the anarchic international system. A long-standing view holds that this is particularly true for democratic states in which changeable public preferences make it difficult for leaders to sustain commitments over time. However, a number of important elements in the values and institutions that have characterized the liberal democratic states should enhance their ability to sustain international commitments. Indeed, an examination of the durability of international military alliances confirms that those between democratic states have endured longer than either alliances between nondemocracies or alliances between democracies and nondemocracies.

Whereas historical accounts of U.S. tariff policy from 1877 to 1934 emphasize the pivotal role of parties, previous quantitative studies have failed to identify significant partisan effects. A formal model of policymaking in which strong parties aggregate voters' preferences provides empirical equations to test for partisan effects. Subsequent time series analysis shows that, even after controlling for interest group demands, partisan control of government did significantly affect the tariff. Moreover, during the period under study, the two political parties enacted tariff policies that benefited different sets of producer groups at the expense of others. Thus, political institutions did play a significant role in shaping the interests that influence U.S. foreign economic policy.

Although agents employ a wide range of conflict management techniques in practice, scholars have evaluated only a few of these. A more complete empirical analysis of the spectrum of third-party procedures used to manage international crises reveals that two techniques in particular are most effective: mediation efforts and third-party activities to open or maintain lines of communication. The endpoints of preventing escalation and promoting peaceful settlement take into account the notion of conflict as a dynamic evolutionary process, consisting of several phases, which in turn affect the outcome of third-party management. Crisis management methods that have proved successful in a bipolar world may be similarly successful in the post-cold war environment, an issue future work must address.

To explain the strong finding that democracies rarely fight other democracies, analysts typically focus on some attribute of regime type. This linkage may be spurious, at least in part. The emergence and persistence of the first wave of liberal republics and democracies were greatly facilitated by the prior resolution of regional primacy questions. Because early democracies did not engage fully in competitions for regional primacy and territorial expansion, they were less likely to attack other states, democracies or otherwise, in their home regions. Nonexpansionist foreign policies also discouraged the domestic concentration of economic and political power, which in turn facilitated democratization processes. Four historical cases illustrate how regional primacy issues preceded the development of democracy and either undermined or facilitated democratization processes in major powers that have been especially important to the annals of war participation. Further research on whether peace antecedes democracy or the other way around appears warranted.