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Using data on international investment arbitration, the authors catalog the types of state actors involved in disputes and the actions that lead to arbitration. We find that the majority of disputes are the result of actions taken by the executive branch.

We investigate empirically changes in voting in the United Nations General Assembly consequent to leader turnovers over the 1985-2008 period and find evidence that governments with new rulers are more supportive of the United States on important votes. We consider the explanations that might underlie our empirical result, including material gain and ethical motivations. In contrast to our findings on key votes, our results show that voting on non-key votes in the General Assembly does not robustly shift towards the U.S. following leader change. We therefore conclude that material gain is the most likely reason for the observed pattern. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]

There is an increased focus in comparative politics and international relations on how choices of governments are dependent on choices made by other governments. The authors argue that although the relationship between policy choices across countries is often labeled as either diffusion or competition, in many cases the theoretical mechanisms underpinning these labels are unclear. In this article, the authors build a model of social learning with a specific application to the diffusion of corporate tax reductions. The model yields predictions that are differentiable from existing models of tax competition. Specifically, the authors argue that social learning is most likely in the wake of tax policy cuts by left governments. They test the model using an existing data set of corporate tax rate changes and an author-created data set of changes in tax legislation, covering 20 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. The authors' empirical findings show that social learning is an important determinant of corporate tax policy making. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

There is an increased focus in comparative politics and international relations on how choices of governments are dependent on choices made by other governments. The authors argue that although the relationship between policy choices across countries is often labeled as either diffusion or competition, in many cases the theoretical mechanisms underpinning these labels are unclear. In this article, the authors build a model of social learning with a specific application to the diffusion of corporate tax reductions. The model yields predictions that are differentiable from existing models of tax competition. Specifically, the authors argue that social learning is most likely in the wake of tax policy cuts by left governments. They test the model using an existing data set of corporate tax rate changes and an author-created data set of changes in tax legislation, covering 20 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. The authors' empirical findings show that social learning is an important determinant of corporate tax policy making.

Much political science scholarship, including important work in this journal, has explored the implications of natural resource endowments— particularly oil and other highly valuable export commodities—on political and economic outcomes. Although the first wave of literature emphasized the negative effects of these resources, more recent work emphasizes how domestic institutions can condition the relationship, sometimes leading to positive effects. In this special issue, the authors expand this literature in two important ways. First, they renew attention on the international dimensions of this relationship, exploring how trade, migration, foreign investment, and other global forces influence the effects these resources have on countries. Second, they link the study of the globalization—natural resources nexus to broader debates in international and comparative political economy, such as how domestic institutions shape the impact of globalization and how economic factors affect the political survival of regimes and individual leaders. The five studies in this collection use a variety of research methodologies (formal models, country case studies, and large- N empirical analyses) to examine several different international economic factors linking resources with politics. The findings provide new insights into the politics of natural resources, expand the traditional focus of the resource curse literature to include other natural resources (e.g., water), and shed light on whether globalization has the ability to improve natural resource governance around the world.

In this project we explore the relationship between leader change and relations between states. Voting in the United Nation's General Assembly (UNGA) is often used as a measure of political proximity between countries. We use UN voting coincidence to examine how changes in leadership affect relations. Specifically, we examine how political change affects a country's voting with the United States. In this paper we explore how leadership change affects UNGA voting. Using differences between "key" and "non-key" UN votes to the United States, we explore if political change is driven by preference change or by a changing external position. While political change has little impact on voting on non-key issues (state preferences) we find that after leadership change, countries are more likely to vote in line with the United States on key UN votes.

This article argues that stock market responses to political events provide information on how politics affect markets. Political events, such as the election of a politician that is expected to enact "market-friendly" policies, lead to increases in stock market returns. Conversely, political events that are expected to have a negative impact on the economy and specific firms lead to decreases in stock market returns. The 2002 Brazilian presidential election provides a critical case study for evaluating this hypothesis. The authors use movements in the Brazilian stock market as proxies for future expectations for the Brazilian economy. Using a number of time-series regressions, they estimate the impact of the four main Brazilian presidential candidates on the mean and variance of the Brazilian stock market. These findings provide important insights into the expected impact of the main presidential candidates on the Brazilian economy and more generally, the relationship between elections and economic performance.