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Political corruption is rampant in—and destructive to—many parts of the world. A growing number of international organizations (IOs) claim to address the problem by encouraging good governance norms and rules, such as anti-corruption standards and practices. Whether membership in IOs dampens corruption, however, is unclear. Our central argument is that the characteristics of IO membership determine both whether corruption is tolerated and the extent to which formal anti-corruption rules effectively combat the problem. First, groups of corrupt states are reticent to enforce good governance norms or rules against other IO members, rendering punishment for corruption incredible. Second, leaders may witness the value of corruption to their IO peers and learn to act the same way. Using a variety of data sources and estimation strategies, including new data on IO anti-corruption mandates, we demonstrate that: (1) countries that participate in member-corrupted IOs are significantly more likely to engage in corruption themselves—and experience an increase in corruption over time—than are countries that participate in less corrupt IOs; and (2) this tolerance for corruption occurs even within IOs that have adopted formal anti-corruption mandates, rendering good governance rules largely cheap talk among organizations governed by corrupt principles.

Media attention is unevenly allocated across global human rights problems, prompting anger, frustration, and recrimination in the international system. This article demonstrates that from 1981 to 2000, three leading Anglo-American media sources disproportionately covered Latin American abuses, in human rights terms, as compared to other world regions. This "Latin Human Rights Bias" runs counter to broader trends within the Anglo-American general coverage of foreign news, where Latin America's share of reporting is far smaller. The Bias is partially explained by the region's proximity to the United States (US), its relevance to US policy debates, and by path dependency. A significant portion of the Latin Bias remains unexplained, however, despite our best attempts to rigorously model explanations offered by leading Western journalists. These findings suggest that geographic regions are an important factor in the media's perception of global human rights problems and that both human rights policymakers and scholars may be inappropriately drawing general lessons from regionally specific and biased patterns. We conclude with suggestions for future research. Adapted from the source document.

In this article, we seek to explain both the origins of gender mainstreaming as a `policy frame' in International Relations, as well as the variable implementation of mainstreaming over time and across various international organizations. We emphasize that in the years since the UN Fourth World Women's Conference in Beijing (1995), mainstreaming has been endorsed and adopted not only by European organizations and governments, but also by nearly every important international organization, and we compare the adoption and implementation of mainstreaming in two international organizations, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme. We suggest, however, that the rhetorical acceptance of mainstreaming by various international organizations obscures considerable diversity in both the timing and the nature of mainstreaming processes within and among organizations. This variation, we argue, can be explained in terms of the categories of political opportunity, mobilizing structures and strategic framing put forward by social movement theorists.

This article examines & explains the adoption of gender mainstreaming by the European Union (EU), & traces its implementation in five issue-areas of EU policy: structural funds, employment, development, competition, & science research & development. The EU decision to adopt gender mainstreaming, as well as its variable implementation across issue-areas, can be explained in terms of three factors derived from social movement theory: the political opportunities offered by EU institutions in various issue-areas; the mobilizing structures, or European networks, established among the advocates of gender equality; & the efforts of such advocates to strategically frame the gender-mainstreaming mandate so as to ensure its acceptance by EU policymakers. 1 Table, 51 References. Adapted from the source document.