This article examines the domestic political sources of immigration control in advanced market economy countries after World War II. Immigration control can be distinguished from the broader concept of immigration policy by its emphasis on state policies that define the permissible level of resident alien admissions. The analysis is based on the well-established fact that immigrant communities are geographically concentrated. I argue that this geographic concentration creates an uneven distribution of costs and benefits, providing a spatial context for immigration politics. In this context, net public demand for tighter immigration control increases in localities where immigrants concentrate when those areas experience higher unemployment, rapid increases in immigration, higher immigrant proportions, and more generous immigrant access to social services. Each of these conditions aggravates competition between immigrants and natives, and hence native hostility, in these communities while employer support for immigration usually diminishes. Yet national politicians may ignore changes in the demand for immigration control unless these constituencies are also able to swing a national election from one party to another. The larger and less “safe” the local constituencies, the greater their influence in this sense. Evidence from the United Kingdom between 1955 and 1981 is consistent with these propositions.

Some treaties are signed and then ratified quickly while others languish in legal limbo, unratified by one or more parties. What explains this variation in the time between signature and ratification? The international relations literature has not taken the ratification stage seriously enough, despite its obvious importance from a legal and a political perspective. We offer a systematic study of this question in the context of bilateral investment treaties. We develop and test a set of theoretical propositions related to domestic-level constraints on the executive, the varying ability of governments to rationally anticipate ratification obstacles, and the bilateral relationship between treaty partners. We generally find support for these propositions but report some surprising findings as well. The article presents implications for investment agreements and treaty making more generally, and raises a number of issues for further study at the intersection of international politics and law.

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.

United Nations policy forbids its peacekeepers and other personnel from engaging in transactional sex (the exchange of money, favors, or gifts for sex), but we find the behavior to be very common in our survey of Liberian women. Using satellite imagery and GPS locators, we randomly selected 1,381 households and randomly sampled 475 women between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Using an iPod in private to preserve the anonymity of their responses, these women answered sensitive questions about their sexual histories. More than half of them had engaged in transactional sex, a large majority of them (more than 75 percent) with UN personnel. We estimate that each additional battalion of UN peacekeepers caused a significant increase in a woman's probability of engaging in her first transactional sex. Our findings raise the concern that the private actions of UN personnel in the field may set back the UN's broader gender-equality and economic development goals, and raise broader questions about compliance with international norms.

Some member-states of the European Union (EU) want a supranational foreign and security policy, while other member-states oppose any significant limitation of national sovereignty in this domain. What explains this variation? Answering this question could help us to better understand not only the trajectory of European unification, but also the conditions and prospects of consensual political integration in other regional contexts and territorial scales. The main research traditions in international relations theory suggest different explanations. I examine the roles of relative power capabilities, foreign policy interests, Europeanized identities, and domestic multilevel governance in determining the preferences of the fifteen EU member governments concerning the institutional depth of their foreign and security policy cooperation. I find that power capabilities and collective identities have a significant influence, but the effect of ideas about the nature and locus of sovereignty, as reflected in the domestic constitution of each country, is particularly remarkable.A previous version of this article was presented at the 4th ECPR Pan-European International Relations Conference, Canterbury, 8–10 September 2001. For their valuable comments, I would like to thank Filippo Andreatta, Daniele Archibugi, Simone Borra, Nicola Dunbar, Fabio Franchino, Alkuin Kölliker, Leonardo Morlino, Angelo Panebianco, Eiko Thielemann, Ben Tonra, the editors of IO, and three anonymous reviewers. I am responsible for any mistakes.

Many theories of international relations contain a narrative of progress and explain that progress with reference to evolutionary imagery. This article examines critically: the relevance of Darwinian and Lamarckian models of international relations to the evolution of international ethics and institutions; and the possibility that the ethics and norms are likely to be more consistent with existing world orders than challengers to it. Specifically, this article draws from evolutionary social science and organizational theory to develop a framework to explore the initial diversity of the meaning and practices of humanitarianism; how the combination of environmental mechanisms and organizational culture led many humanitarian agencies to adapt to their environment in ways that incorporated politics; and the subsequent countermovement by some agencies who wanted to purify humanitarianism. I then apply this framework to explain the recent history of four international aid agencies. I conclude with several observations regarding how the model as applied to these cases allows us to examine critically the selection mechanisms that do and do not account for ethical change and how scholars of international norms, ethics, and progress should be attentive to how principled actors are creatures of the world they want to transform.

Since the notion of the “national interest” plays a pivotal role in the discourse of state action, its clarification as a normative term is historically as well as systematically important. Differing from the conventional approach, which defines the national interest according to genus and taxa, I shall argue that due to its function as a normative term the national interest cannot be understood in taxonomic categories; it necessitates an investigation of the logic of its use according to specified criteria. In this context the notion of the “public interest” is, for historical as well as systematic reasons, illuminating. As historical investigation shows, the term national interest is neither self-justificatory nor arbitrary within the conventions of the European state system until the late nineteenth century. Important changes in the international system can be traced by following the fundamentally changed usage of the term after 1870. A short comparison with and critique of Waltz's “systemic theory” of international relations concludes the article.

Foreign investment in Africa's mineral resources has increased dramatically. This paper addresses three questions raised by this trend: do commercial mining investments increase the likelihood of social or armed conflict? If so, when are these disputes most prevalent? And, finally, what mechanisms help explain these conflicts? I show, first, that mining has contrasting effects on social and armed conflict: while the probability of protests or riots increases (roughly doubling) after mining starts, there is no increase in rebel activity. Second, I show that the probability of social conflict rises with plausibly exogenous increases in world commodity prices. Finally, I compile additional geo-spatial and survey data to explore potential mechanisms, including reporting bias, environmental harm, in-migration, inequality, and governance. Finding little evidence consistent with these accounts, I develop an explanation related to incomplete information—a common cause of conflict in industrial and international relations. This mechanism rationalizes why mining induces protest, why these conflicts are exacerbated by rising prices, and why transparency dampens the relationship between prices and protest.

A core proposition from decades of research on internal wars asserts that democracies, with their casualty-averse publics, accountable leaders, and free media, are uniquely prone to losing counterinsurgency (COIN) wars. Yet one should question this finding, for two reasons. First, existing studies overwhelmingly adopt no-variance research designs that only examine democracies, leaving them unable to assess their performance relative to autocracies. Second, these studies do not control for confounding factors that bias causal estimates. Democracies, for example, typically fight wars of choice as external occupiers, while most autocracies face homegrown insurgencies, a function in part of divergent levels of state capacity possessed by democratic and autocratic combatants. This study corrects for both problems using a new dataset of insurgencies (1800–2005) and matching to test whether democracies experience significantly higher rates of defeat and shorter wars. No relationship between democracy and war outcomes or duration is found once regime type is varied and inferential threats are addressed.

Why were advanced industrial states able to keep their economies relatively open to foreign trade in the 1970s and the early 1980s, despite declining U.S. hegemony and increasing economic difficulties? This article argues that an international-level change affected domestic trade politics and contributed to the maintenance of a liberal trading system. Examining the United States and France, the argument proceeds in two steps, showing first how domestic trade politics were changed and second how this change affected the policy process. Initially, I argue that aspects of the increased international economic interdependence of the postwar period altered domestic trade politics by creating new, anti-protectionist preferences among certain firms. Firms with extensive international ties through exports, multinational production, and global intra-firm trade have come to oppose protectionism, since it is very costly for them. Evidence for these new preferences was apparent among both American and French industries. Despite different contexts, firms in the two countries reacted similarly to the growth of interdependence. Next, I ask whether firms' preferences affected trade policy outcomes and show how these preferences were integrated into the policy process in both countries. Trade policy structures in neither country prevented firms' preferences from affecting the policies adopted. Even in France, a so-called “strong” state, firms' preferences were a key influence on policy. In the trade policy area then, the French and American states did not appear to differ greatly in their susceptibility to industry influence, even though their policy processes were different.

The Democratic Peace stands as one of the most coherent and recognizable programs of study in international relations. Yet despite the pages of research devoted to the subject and claims about its law-like nature, the democratic peace remains a highly contested finding. In large part, this contestation arises out of an enduring question: What exactly keeps democracies from fighting? Drawing on the securitization theory of the Copenhagen School as well as social psychology, this article claims that a critical mechanism of the democratic peace lies at the political junction between policymakers and the public. I argue that the democratic identity of the public, grounded in basic democratic norms essential for the function of any democracy at any time, plays an independent role in the construction of security and foreign policy in the United States. To test the argument, I examine the difficult case of the 1971 Bangladesh War, when President Richard Nixon sent the USS Enterprise carrier group to the Bay of Bengal. Analysis of public statements as well as administration documentation reveals that, while Nixon and national security advisor Henry Kissinger actively saw India as a threat to U.S. interests, they were constrained by their belief that the public would not accept a security argument with respect to a fellow democracy.

What makes a diplomatic or military signal credible? In strategic settings where deception is possible, rational actors' interpretations rely on their beliefs, intuition, and imagination—they rely on emotion. Two properties of emotion—as an assimilation mechanism and its use as evidence—are key to addressing four strategic problems. First, emotion explains why actors worry needlessly about their reputations. Second, emotion is important to understanding costly signals. Third, emotion explains radical changes in preferences. Fourth, emotion sharpens understanding of strategic problems without being self-invalidating: common knowledge of emotion's effects do not always change those effects. Understanding how rational actors think requires turning to emotion. Evidence from the Korean War captures strengths and weaknesses of competing perspectives.

The United States' notice of withdrawal from the ILO is to be understood in terms of hegemonic power relations. “Tripartism” is an ideology based upon a dominant historical tendency, namely the emergence of a corporative form of state in both developed and underdeveloped countries. The AFL-CIO has participated in the construction of the corporative state in the US and has supported its hegemonic role in the world in concert with American business interests and the CIA. Neither the ILO nor international trade union organizations (especially the ICFTU) has enjoyed a stable relationship with the center of hegemonic power in the labor field, since the AFL-CIO has conducted a unilateral foreign policy. The functionalist strategy of executive leadership asserting the autonomy of an international organization through task expansion in technical fields has been almost totally irrelevant to the issue. Nor has the ILO found an alternative counter-hegemonic base of support, e.g., in the Third World. The existing hegemony has reasserted itself through the ILO program and ideology even as the US has withdrawn material support. Hegemony, which no longer operates through majority votes in international organizations, works instead through bureaucratic controls. This structure of power has prevented the ILO from confronting effectively the real social issues of employment-creation, land reform, marginality, and poverty in general. Initiatives that have been taken to deal with such issues have all ultimately been diverted into programs consistent with the hegemonic ideology and power relations.

Scholars agree that the preliminary ruling system of the European Court of Justice has been instrumental in promoting European integration; however, no consensus has been reached as to why the system is used. Although many explanations have been posited, there has been no systematic comparative test among them to date. In this article, we perform this test. We find evidence that transnational economic activity, public support for integration, monist or dualist tradition, judicial review, and the public's political awareness influence use of the preliminary ruling system.We would like to acknowledge Matthew Gabel, Eric Reinhardt, Georg Vanberg, and Christopher Zorn for helpful comments. We would also like to acknowledge the support of NSF grant #0079084.

We explore the impact of issue framing on individual attitudes toward international trade. Based on a survey experiment fielded in Argentina during 2007, which reproduces the setup of earlier studies in the United States, we show that individuals' position in the economy and their material concerns define the strength of their prior beliefs about international trade, and thereby mitigate their sensitivity to the new dimensions introduced in informational cues. Extending the analysis beyond the United States to a country with different skill endowments allows us to better explore the role of material and nonmaterial attributes on individual attitudes toward trade. We find that skill is a central predictor of support for openness. The effect is strongest for individuals in the service sector and in cities that cater to the producers of agricultural commodities. Our findings suggest that the pattern of support for economic integration reflects the predictions from recent literature in international economics that emphasizes trade's impact on the relative demand for skilled labor regardless of factor endowments. Our findings also amend recent empirical contributions that suggest socialization is the main factor explaining individual sensitivity to issue framing on trade preferences. We suggest that material conditions associated with income and price effects are crucial, both in shaping trade preferences and in affecting the malleability of attitudes to issue framing. Hence, our results provide a crucial contribution to our general understanding of the attributes shaping susceptibility to political framing in policy debates.

Bureaucrats working in international intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) regularly help states design new IGOs. Sometimes international bureaucrats possess limited discretion in institutional design; sometimes, they enjoy broad discretion. In fact, they gain discretion even when they openly oppose state preferences. This contravenes conventional thinking about delegation: discretion should decrease as preference divergence between states and international bureaucrats increases. We develop a principal-agent theory of how much discretion states grant to international bureaucrats in the design of new IGOs. This is novel: while principal-agent theories of international delegation are common, scholars have not analyzed principal-agent relationships in the creation of new IGOs. We argue that even an international bureaucracy that disagrees with states' design preferences may enjoy substantial design leeway, because of states' need for bureaucratic expertise. In developing this argument, we employ a formal principal-agent model, case studies, and an original data set.

German and Japanese counterterrorism policies differ from those adopted by the United States as well as from one another. Defeated in war, occupied, and partially remade during the Cold War, Germany and Japan became clients of the United States first, then close allies. Both countries offer easy tests to explore the extent to which the United States can hope to fight the war against terrorism, as it did the Cold War, supported by a broad coalition of like-minded states. On this central point the article's conclusion is not reassuring. In contrast to the Cold War, the relative importance of different self-conceptions and institutional practices appears to be larger and the systemic effects constraining national divergences smaller. Even among the closest allies of the United States, the very early stages of the war against terrorism point to substantial strains. Over a prolonged period such strains are likely to affect profoundly long-standing patterns of alliance.

If competing beliefs about political events in the world stem largely from information asymmetries, then more information and knowledge should reduce the gap in competing perceptions. Empirical studies of decision making, however, often find just the reverse: as knowledge and the stakes in play go up, the beliefs about what is happening polarize rather than converge. The theory proposed here attributes this to motivated reasoning. Emotions inside the observer shape beliefs along with information coming from the outside world. A series of experiments embedded in a national survey of Americans finds that a primary driver of the beliefs someone forms about globalization, other countries, and the politics in the Middle East is how strongly they attach their social identity to the United States. Attachment produces more intense positive and negative emotions that in turn shape the interpretation of unfolding events and lead norms to be applied in an inconsistent fashion. People, in effect, rewrite reality around their favored course of action, marrying the logic of appropriateness to their own preferences. Beliefs, consequently, are not independent of preferences but related to them. Motivated reasoning, while not consistent with rational models, is predictable and can lead to expensive mistakes and double standards that undermine liberal internationalism.

The literature, both empirical and theoretical, regarding techniques of peaceful settlement in international conflict is notable primarily for its brevity. This is true of mediation as one principal method of conflict resolution. Those studies that are available tend to emphasize the diverse functions an intermediary can perform, resulting in a generally optimistic assessment of the utility of mediation. There has been an accompanying tendency to focus upon the qualities of a successful or ideal mediator. But an analysis of two cases of mediation suggests that: (1) the scope for effective mediation is much narrower than a list of the functions an intermediary can serve might indicate, and (2) the success or failure of mediation is largely determined by the nature of the dispute with the attributes and tactics of the mediator a marginal factor at best. Characteristics of a conflict which affect its susceptibility to mediation include: (1) the distribution of power among the protagonists, (2) the interests at stake, (3) the price of nonsettlement, and (4) personality factors.

In spite of its widespread use, no one has ever stated clearly what the distinction between bipolar and multipolar systems refers to. Moreover, some common definitions of “bipolarity” imply behavior that is inconsistent with the behavior of states during the cold war. This article argues that the distinctive feature of post–World War II international politics was not that two states were more powerful than the others, as the literature on bipolarity would suggest, but that one state, the Soviet Union, occupied in peacetime a position of near-dominance on the Eurasian continent, a position that states in the past had been able to achieve only after a series of military victories. This fact explains the behavior that others have sought to explain by bipolarity, as well as behavior that is inconsistent with what common definitions of bipolarity would lead us to expect. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the argument for structural theories of international politics and controversies about what lies ahead.