Why have Western donors' efforts to encourage development of Russian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) varied dramatically in two different NGO sectors, despite similar levels of assistance? I forward a norms-based explanation for varying success in bolstering the Russian women's and soldiers' rights movements. Where foreign assistance is employed to promote norms that are universally embraced, it is highly likely to lead to a successful NGO movement. In contrast, when foreign assistance pursues norms that are specific to other societal contexts, it will fail to develop an NGO movement, regardless of the amount of funding foreign donors devote. NGOs and foreign donors have succeeded by articulating a universal norm against physical harm in the cases of soldiers' rights and domestic violence, but have failed by voicing specifically Western norms of gender equality and feminism in the case of women's rights.I wish to thank Kathleen Collins, Elisabeth Friedman, Kathryn Hochstetler, David Holloway, Stephen Krasner, Gail Lapidus, Michael McFaul, and especially Richard Price, Lisa Martin, and two anonymous reviewers for their close readings and comments on versions of this article. Thanks also to Kimberly Swanzey for excellent research assistance and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support of the research.

International election monitoring (IEM) has partially redefined sovereignty. In this article I locate the origins of this change in the Americas, claiming that the Western Hemisphere's normative structure, what I call the Western Hemisphere Idea, was particularly conducive to this new understanding of state sovereignty. In the first section, I introduce the continental normative structure, highlighting the way in which it contributed to the eventual emergence of the monitoring practice in the early 1960s, and I discuss methodological issues. In the second section, I briefly review the emergence of IEM, looking at the pioneering work of the Organization of American States (OAS) in election monitoring. In the third section, I review the subsequent appearance of IEM outside the regional organization. The convergence of intergovernmental organizations and international nongovernmental organizations in election monitoring is then considered in the fourth section. Finally, I present the conclusions and theoretical implications of this piece.I would like to thank Peter Katzenstein, Lisa Martin, Valerie Bunce, Mat Evangelista, Aida Hozic, Kathleen O'Neil, Hector Schamis, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this article.

This article examines the dynamics and implications of practices of socialization enacted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in post–Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. With particular emphasis on the Czech Republic and Romania, I argue that NATO relied extensively on mechanisms of teaching and persuasion to project a particular set of liberal-democratic norms of security into the former Eastern bloc. Several interrelated conditions affected NATO's ability to teach new norms to Central and East European actors: the parties' mutual recognition of their respective roles as “teachers” and “students”; the socializees' identification with the Western security community that NATO claimed to embody; and systematic interactions between teachers and students. In teaching new liberal-democratic norms, NATO exercised significant power: the power to shape its socializees' interpretations of the world and ideas about proper ways of acting in that world. The shared ideational framework established via teaching also empowered subsequent persuasive appeals launched in the name of liberal-democratic norms. NATO conducted a socialization process that targeted—and often affected—not simply the behavior of Central and East European socializees, but also their definitions of national identity and interests.For extremely helpful comments on previous incarnations of this article, I am grateful to the editors of International Organization, two anonymous reviewers, Jeffrey Checkel, Michael Zürn, Alastair Iain Johnston, Michael C. Williams, and all the participants in the IDNET workshops.

While the revival of the concept of “imperialism” appears to be a reaction to recent political challenges, I argue that it has always been at the core of liberal thought in international relations. While liberal internationalism enlists the authority of Immanuel Kant, at its heart one finds the security dilemma between liberal and nonliberal states as well as the propagation of particularist law under a universal guise. This un-Kantian liberal thought, however, has a classical precedent in John Stuart Mill, with whom it shares the justification of imperialist policies. A historically sensitive reading of Mill and Kant, however, can explain the striking failures of liberal internationalism in spreading liberal institutions as well as reducing international conflicts.I am profoundly grateful for the encouraging and exceptionally constructive comments of the two anonymous reviewers as well as the editor of International Organization, which triggered a substantial further development of the initial argument. I would also like to thank Barry Hindess for his comments as well as for his articles on liberalism pointing out the parallels between domestic and international liberalism. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Culture and International History Conference, 2002, in Wittenberg, and I would like to thank Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher for the organization as well as the participants for inspiring discussions. Special thanks are due to David Boucher for inviting me to speak about John Stuart Mill at a research seminar in Cardiff that gave me the opportunity to try out my interpretation of Mill on Political Theorists. Students and faculty at Cardiff University provided very interesting and fruitful suggestions. Thanks are also due to Robbie Shilliam, whose work as a research assistant in connection with another project turned up some of the literature for this article. Finally, as always, I am grateful to Justin Rosenberg for generously devoting his time to improving my English in style and grammar.

This article reflects on three sets of issues raised by the research in this special issue. First it summarizes and critiques the core analytical claims and main scope conditions for socialization as developed by the authors. Then it examines how a critical socialization micro-process—persuasion—fits with a thin rationalist argument. I suggest that agents who are more deeply socialized may be more strategic in their behavior precisely because they are true believers. Thus the presence of strategic behavior does not undermine the possibility of persuasion. It may be an especially obvious consequence of persuasion. Finally, I examine how the authors understand socialization and identity change. Here I argue that the content of identity needs to be unpacked further into four dimensions—constitutive norms, social purpose, relational beliefs, and cognitive worldviews—in order to more fully test how much, and what type of, identity change occurs as a result of socialization. Finally, the article looks at how the findings in the European case might be extended to, and compared with, empirical evidence from other parts of the world, in particular Asia.Thanks to Jeff Checkel, Michael Glosny, and two anonymous referees for comments and criticisms.

Scholars have long debated the relative influence of domestic and international factors on the presidential use of force. On one matter, however, consensus reigns: the U.S. Congress is presumed irrelevant. This presumption, we demonstrate, does not hold up to empirical scrutiny. Using a variety of measures and models, we show a clear connection between the partisan composition of Congress and the quarterly frequency of major uses of force between 1945 and 2000; we do not find any congressional influence, however, on minor uses of force. We recommend that the quantitative use-of-force literature in international relations begin to take seriously theories of domestic political institutions, partisanship, and interbranch relations that have been developed within American politics.We thank the Center for American Political Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation for financial support; and Doug Kriner, Matthew Scherbarth, and Kevin Warnke for research assistance. David Canon, Matt Dickinson, Ben Fordham, David Lewis, and Alastair Smith provided helpful feedback. We also benefited from seminars at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, Harvard University, Ohio State University, and Emory University. Two anonymous reviewers provided excellent feedback. Standard disclaimers apply.

This article is a critique of Kelemen and Sibbitt's “The Globalization of American Law” (International Organization, Winter 2004). I first deal with the inconsistency of their treatment of their dependent variable, suggesting that they should have examined the interaction of three different diffusion processes. I then suggest that the explanations that they provide for the globalization of the American style are inadequate, and that the explanations that they reject require a second look. Consequently, their article conveys at best a partial picture of the process of change, its sources, and its outcomes. I highlight their inadequate treatment of the World Society Approach (WSA), the notion of regulatory competition, and the reduction of the role of ideas and agency, particularly the role of neoliberal ideas and big American and European business, to mere reflections of economic processes of globalization and liberalization. I also suggest that Kelemen and Sibbitt's did not lift their gaze beyond the boundaries of the political science discipline. In particular I argue that they do not examine the interaction of juridification, legalization, and judicialization on the one hand and adversarial legalism and responsive regulation on the other. I conclude with some suggestions for an interdisciplinary perspective on the study of global legal and regulatory change.I am grateful for intriguing comments from and discussions with John Braithwaite, Peter Cane, Peter Drahos, Peter Grabosky, and Frans van Waarden. All responsibility is, of course, mine.

We develop a model of international negotiation in which states anticipate that the agreements they sign will only be partly implemented. The results differ significantly from theories of domestic ratification that have previously been applied to this problem. Negotiators do not try to satisfy the implementer and may even choose agreements that the implementer would explicitly reject in a ratification model. Partial implementation also makes it possible for two negotiators to reach agreements outside their usual win-set. This situation may allow one country to make extraordinary concessions, knowing that some provisions will never be fully implemented. We apply these claims to Sino-American negotiations over intellectual property rights, where implementation has been a recurrent issue. The theory enriches the theory of two-level games, which has focused much too narrowly on formal ratification without amendment as the canonical case of domestic influence over international bargaining.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago. We would like to thank Aslaug Asgeirsdottir, Brian Gaines, Lisa Martin, two anonymous referees, and attendees at the MPSA panel for their comments. Any errors remain our responsibility.

We welcome David Levi-Faur's critique of our article, both because it serves to stimulate debate on this important topic and because it provides us with the opportunity to elaborate on our arguments and touch on their wider potential applicability. Levi-Faur does not take issue with our central empirical finding—that American legal style is spreading to other jurisdictions—nor with our normative assessment of the mixed blessings of this trend. We agree with Levi-Faur that many questions concerning legal change have been largely overlooked by political scientists, and we agree that he raises a number of points that highlight the need for refinements of our argument. Yet, for all that we agree on, we disagree strongly with Levi-Faur's analysis and his main lines of criticism. His core criticisms concern our conceptualization of the dependent variable in our study, our purported disregard of alternative explanations, and our inadequate attention to the importers of American law and processes of “localization.” In this article, we respond to each of these criticisms in turn. We then discuss the generalizability of our argument beyond Europe and Japan. We conclude with suggestions for further research.

Building on the empirical findings of the preceding articles, we advance three arguments. First, while socialization research has typically been construed as constructivism's home turf, this volume's emphasis on mechanisms and scope conditions reveals that rational choice has much to contribute here as well. We develop this claim by undertaking a “double interpretation” of each essay, which allows us to advance more fine-grained arguments connecting the two social theories. Second, while there are good conceptual reasons for expecting a predominance of international socialization in Europe, the empirical cases instead suggest that its effects are often weak and secondary to dynamics at the national level. We make sense of this puzzle by reasoning more explicitly in longitudinal terms, by drawing on work on European identity, and by noting that students of European socialization—as well as integration—have much to gain by “bringing the domestic back in.” Finally, while our collaborators have demonstrated the empirical and theoretical benefits of combining a social ontology with a positivist epistemology, this comes at a cost, with normative perspectives neglected. This matters—and all the more so in a Europe marked by supranational constitution- and polity building. Socialization dynamics may well take us beyond the nation-state, but their legitimacy and governance implications bring us back—forcefully—to it.We are grateful to the project participants and contributors to this volume for valuable discussions on the themes addressed here. For detailed comments on earlier versions of this essay, we thank two anonymous reviewers, the IO editors, Peter Katzenstein, and Ron Mitchell.

This article probes the relationship between neoliberal economic policies and political corruption, focusing in particular on the impact of trade and investment policies, regulatory policy, and the overall size of the public sector on corruption. Using a large cross-national data set from the mid- to late 1990s, we test the neoliberal hypotheses that market-oriented economic policies are associated with lower levels of political corruption, and state intervention in the economy with higher levels. Consistent with the neoliberal argument, we find that open trade and investment policies and low, effective regulatory burdens do correlate with lower levels of political corruption. However, we find no consistent relationship between the aggregate size of the public sector and political corruption. While the neoliberal hypothesis on political corruption has initial empirical support, its lessons cannot be applied wholesale. Market-oriented states may be less corrupt, but interventionist states, as measured by public spending, are not necessarily more corrupt.Previous versions of this article were presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, La., March 24–27, 2002; the Seminar on U.S. and World Affairs, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif., January 2003; and the Seminar on Comparative Politics, Department of Political Science, Stanford University, February 2003. The authors thank participants at each of these venues for their valuable comments. Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Chappell Lawson, Armando Razo, and three anonymous reviewers provided especially useful suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply. Gerring is grateful for financial support provided by the Institute for Advanced Study, and Thacker for the support provided by the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Both Gerring and Thacker are thankful for support from the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Boston University.

While many herald globalization—the increasing interconnectedness of national economies—to be associated with rising standards of living across the globe, others fear its effects on sustainability. Antiglobalization forces and environmentalists view these developments as a threat to the welfare of future generations because of profligate and excessive current consumption. This study is the first to estimate the effects of dependence on trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), and an index of economic freedom on the World Bank's measure of sustainability (the genuine savings rate), which measures the rate at which investment in the total stock of manufactured, human, and natural capital exceeds its depreciation. Contrary to pessimists' fears, our indicators of economic openness show positive effects on sustainability, results that are robust to sample size, testing procedure, and several alternative specifications. The results support those who suggest that distorted economies tend to be both inefficient and damaging to future generations. If increasing trade, FDI, and economic freedom are hallmarks of globalization, then worries about its effects on future well-being are misplaced.Equal authorship. We are grateful to Erich Weede, Rick Auty, Simon Dietz, Paul Hensel, Jonathan Moses, Ragnar Torvik, Jostein Vik, Paivi Lujala, two reviewers, and the editor for comments and suggestions. The anonymous reviewers were extraordinarily constructive. Any remaining errors are entirely our fault. The data are available at 〈http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/Indra.de.Soysa/default.htm〉.

According to the embedded liberalism thesis, governments committed to free trade provide insurance and other transfers to compensate those who lose economically from expanded trade. The goal of this spending is to maintain public support for trade liberalization. We provide a micro-level test of the critical assumption behind the embedded liberalism thesis that government programs designed to protect individuals harmed by imports reduce opposition to free trade. Our micro results have important implications for the macro relationship between trade and government spending, which we also test. We find empirical support for the embedded liberalism thesis in both our micro- and macro-level analyses.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Midwest Political Science Association's 2002 Meeting and at the University of Illinois during summer 2003. We thank the respective panel and seminar participants for their feedback. In addition, we want to acknowledge valuable comments from William Bernhard, Rebecca Blank, Kerwin Charles, Alan Deardorff, John DiNardo, John Freeman, Brian Gaines, Jim Granato, Nathan Jensen, William Keech, Layna Mosley, Robert Pahre, Ken Scheve, Marina Whitman, two anonymous reviewers, and Lisa Martin. They, of course, are not responsible for any errors.

Daniel Nielson and Michael Tierney's article, “Delegation to International Organizations: Agency Theory and World Bank Environmental Reform” (International Organization, Spring 2003), makes a strong argument for ways in which principal-agent (P-A) models advance theoretical explanations of the behavior and performance of international organizations (IOs). Most IOs suffer from widely recognized gaps between their mandates and their performance, gaps not well explained by the major theories in our field. P-A models are premised on the assumption that performance problems naturally arise when one actor (the principal) delegates to another actor (the agent) the authority to act in the former's interests. The models seek to explain why and how the divergence of interests between the two parties may result in the agent's actions differing from the principal's intentions, how agents may be better controlled, and the costs of doing so.I would like to thank Barbara Connolly, Martha Finnemore, Jeffry Frieden, Dan Guttman, Patrick Jackson, Carmela Lutmar, and Melissa Moye for helpful comments.

We thank Tamar Gutner for her thoughtful comments on our article, “Delegation to International Organizations: Agency Theory and World Bank Environmental Reform” (International Organization, Spring 2003). While championing principal-agent (P-A) theory as the most promising approach to the study of international organizations (IOs) in general, she questions the novelty of our P-A model and criticizes both our methods and data. We are grateful for the opportunity to clarify our contributions and offer concrete solutions to the research questions that she raises.We thank Brad Parks and Sue Peterson for comments on an early version of this article. For research assistance, we are grateful to Daniel Magleby, Dan Maliniak, and Jess Sloan.