We have argued in Electing to Fight and other writings that an incomplete democratic transition increases the risk of international and civil war in countries that lack the institutional capacity to sustain democratic politics. The combination of increasing mass political participation and weak political institutions creates the motive and the opportunity for both rising and declining elites to play the nationalist card in an attempt to rally popular support against domestic and foreign rivals.
During the past half-century, states have established a large number of international trade institutions, both multilateral and regional in scope. The existing literature on this topic emphasizes that these agreements are chiefly designed to liberalize and increase the flow of overseas commerce. Yet such institutions have another function that has been largely ignored by researchers, namely, reducing volatility in trade policy and trade flows. Exposure to global markets increases the vulnerability of a country's output to terms of trade shocks. Governments seek to insulate their economies from such instability through membership in international trade institutions, particularly the World Trade Organization (WTO) and preferential trading arrangements (PTAs). We hypothesize that these institutions reduce the volatility of overseas commerce. We further hypothesize that, because market actors prefer price stability, trade institutions increase the volume of foreign commerce by reducing trade variability. This article conducts the first large-scale, multivariate statistical tests of these two hypotheses, using annual data on exports for all pairs of countries from 1951 through 2001. The tests provide strong support for our arguments. PTAs and the WTO regime significantly reduce export volatility. In so doing, these institutions also increase export levels.
Abstract: Countries taking the initial steps from dictatorship toward electoral politics are especially prone to civil and international war. Yet states endowed with coherent institution's such as a functioning bureaucracy and the elements needed to construct a sound legal system, have often been able to democratize peacefully and successfully. Consequently, whenever possible, efforts to promote democracy should try to follow a sequence of building institutions before encouraging mass competitive elections. Democratizing in the wrong sequence not only risks bloodshed in the short term, but also the mobilization of durable illiberal forces with the capacity to block democratic consolidation over the long term.
Struktur und Stärke internationaler Handelsbeziehungen werden von der so genannten "Neuen" und der traditionellen Außenhandelstheorie unterschiedlich postuliert. Wie empirische Ergebnisse nahe legen, wächst die Bandbreite der international gehandelten Güter - eine Folge zunehmender Skalenerträge. Dennoch wird in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur üblicherweise von den Annahmen der traditionellen Theorie ausgegangen. Damit wird das Problem zeitlicher Inkonsistenz, welches unvollständigem Wettbewerb erwachsen kann, ausgeblendet; und damit ebenso der Umstand, dass unvollständiger Wettbewerb die politischen Grundlagen offener internationaler Märkte verschieben kann. Die Autoren führen aus, dass Bündnisse ein optimales Handelsvolumen dann herbeiführen können, wenn Skalenerträge - und nicht unterschiedliche Faktorausstattungen - den Handel bestimmen. Dies können sie empirisch stützen. (kss-swp)
In the wake of the Soviet bloc's collapse, various postcommunist countries rushed to gain greater access to foreign markets. Many of them have made substantial progress in liberalizing commerce, but the movement toward free trade has been by no means universal. One prominent view is that the establishment of democratic institutions has stimulated economic reform in thepostcommunist world. The authors conduct one of the first studies on this topic and find that democracies are indeed more likely to liberalize trade than nondemocracies. They also find that the electoral calendar has a potent influence on the timing of commercial reform in postcommunist democracies: Controlling for a range of factors, politicians are most likely to reduce trade barriers immediately after voters go to the polls. Trade liberalization is much less likely to occur at other points in a democracy's electoral calendar, and elections have no effect on commercial reform in nondemocracies.
AbstractPreferential trading arrangements (PTAs) have spread widely over the past fifty years. During the same era, multilateral openness has grown to unprecedented heights, spurred by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO). If the cornerstone of the manifestly successful multilateral regime is nondiscrimination, why have its members increasingly resorted to preferential liberalization? We argue that developments at the heart of GATT/WTO encourage its members to form PTAs as devices to obtain bargaining leverage within the multilateral regime. Specifically, the growth in GATT/WTO membership, the periodic multilateral trade negotiation rounds, as well as participation and, especially, losses in formal GATT/WTO disputes, have led its members to seek entrance into PTAs. Conducting the first statistical tests on the subject, we find strong evidence in support of this argument.
Scholars and policy makers have displayed a longstanding interest in the politics of economic reform, particularly over the 1990s as former Communist countries struggled to develop market economies. Yet remarkably little systematic research has been conducted on the political economy of commercial reform in the post-Communist world. We argue that the fragmentation of power within post-Communist countries has been a potent force for trade liberalization. In non-democracies where political power is highly concentrated in the hands of a small group of elites, state leaders face few impediments to rent seeking and are well insulated from interests favouring commercial reform. In non-democracies where power is fragmented within the national government, however, new elites with weak ties to the old regime are well placed to use trade liberalization as a weapon against their political opponents. Moreover, the dispersion of power in non-democracies creates space for groups favouring free trade to promote trade liberalization. Finally, in democracies, the dispersion of power within the national government combined with electoral competition creates an especially potent impetus to trade liberalization. To assess these arguments, we analyse the trade policy of post-Communist countries during the period 1990–98. The results support our claims, highlighting the importance of examining institutional differences within as well as across regime types in analyses of economic policy.
