One of the ways that international organizations promote policy agendas is through the use of management strategies, including initiatives that focus on domestic capacity building. As the European Union (EU) has evolved, it has used management strategies to expand its influence over a multitude of policy issues in innovative ways. This research note provides an empirical examination of how the EU has used capacity building strategies in an effort to address violence against women. In particular, I focus on EU efforts to build the capacity of domestic advocacy organizations through the distribution of resources and the facilitation of transnational networking. By using data I collected on the Daphne program, the EU's primary mechanism for addressing gender violence, and by employing both qualitative and social network analysis, I provide empirical evidence that demonstrates how the EU has provided new political opportunities for domestic organizations to improve their capacity to combat violence against women.I would like to acknowledge the following people for their comments and support at various stages of this project: Lee Ann Banaszak, Steven Bloom, Tobin Grant, Phil Habel, Scott McClurg, Emma Moburg-Jones, Meg Rincker, Steve Shulman, Fred Solt, Gina Yannitell Reinhardt, Michelle Wade, and anonymous reviewers.

This research note evaluates the effect of economic interests on public support for American global activism. Those who were relatively well-positioned to benefit economically from the American-backed postwar international order, mainly those with better access to human and financial capital, or who hailed from relatively export-oriented parts of the country, should be more likely to support it. An analysis of American National Election Study data on support for isolationism between 1956 and 2000 supports this line of argument. Individual self-interest is probably the most important pathway through which the international economy has influenced public opinion. However, the aggregate effects of exports and imports on respondents' home states have also made a difference. The effects of these economic interests are substantively large and fairly consistent over time.A previous version of this work was presented to the 2006 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. I would like to thank Michael A. Bailey, Larry Bartels, Matthew Baum, Adam Berinsky, and Kenneth Schultz for their comments. Any remaining errors and omissions are solely the responsibility of the author.

This research note develops a new explanation of postwar peace duration: periods of peace following wars last longer when the war ends in foreign-imposed regime change. This study tests this hypothesis on a new data set (an expansion of Fortna's (2004) data) of all periods of peace following interstate war cease-fires, over the period 1914–2001. It also tests for other possible factors affecting postwar peace duration, including international institutions, the revelation of information during war, third-party intervention during war, postwar changes in the balance of power, regime type, past conflict history, and others. The article finds strong support for the central hypothesis that peace lasts longer following wars that end in foreign-imposed regime change. This pacifying effect diminishes over time when a puppet is imposed, but not when a democracy is imposed. There are other results, including that the strength of a cease-fire agreement has almost no impact on peace duration.

Contemporary conflict research usually measures the influence of ethnicity on conflict by capturing ethnic constellations as country-based indices, such as ethnic fractionalization or polarization. However, such aggregated measures are likely to conceal the actual operation of actor-specific mechanisms. In this article, therefore, we introduce a disaggregated model that measures ethnic groups' access to power. We do so by disaggregating both ethnicity and conflict to the level of explicitly geo-coded center-periphery dyads. This procedure allows us to measure the power balance between politically excluded ethnic groups and dominant actors in terms of group sizes, distances between the center and the periphery, and the roughness of the latter's terrain. We rely on geographic information systems (GIS) to compute demographic and ethno-geographic variables. The dyadic analysis enables us to show that exclusion of powerful ethnic minorities increases the likelihood of conflict considerably. In addition, we show that the risk of conflict is positively associated with the extent of rough terrain in the peripheral group's home region and its distance from the political center.

In “Voting for Change: Calculation, Community, and Euro Referendums” by Joseph Jupille and David Leblang (International Organization 61:4) there is an error in the legend for Figure 1 on page 765. The legend is reversed. The more variable trend line that is identified as Denmark should be Sweden. The opposite holds for the flatter line.