Suchergebnisse

A considerable challenge for the creators of international environmental agreements is how to design mechanisms that deter defection without deterring participation. Relatively ``soft'' law often garners widespread participation, but it creates few concrete incentives for states to improve behavior. ``Harder'' commitments make shirking more difficult, but these institutional features may deter from joining the very states whose practices are least consistent with the treaty's requirements. Empirical analyses of ratification of the core agreements of the climate change regime support these propositions. Flexibility provisions provide one mechanism for states to mitigate this dilemma. The findings with regard to one flexibility mechanism strongly support this argument. The results with regard to a second flexibility mechanism, however, tend to follow an opposite pattern. The author offers a preliminary interpretation of this finding. Finally, this article provides insight into how international social networks and the strength of domestic nongovernmental organizations affect ratification.

The authors investigate the strategic rationale behind the message sent by Osama bin Laden on the eve of the 2004 U.S. Presidential elections. They model this situation as a signaling game in which a population of receivers takes a binary choice, the outcome is decided by majority rule, sender and receivers have conflicting interests, and there is uncertainty about both players' degree of rationality. They characterize the structure of the sequential equilibria of the game as a function of the parameters governing the uncertainty and find that in all pure strategy equilibria, the outcome most preferred by the rational sender is chosen. An explanation of the above-mentioned events relies crucially on the relative likelihood of rational and naive players: If a sufficient departure from full rationality of the electorate is posited, then our model suggests that bin Laden's pre-electoral message succeeded in tilting the race toward his preferred outcome.

What explains variation in domestic political instability in polities imposed by foreign powers? We formulate a framework grounded in four sources of political instability in imposed polities: (1) the initial conditions under which a polity is imposed, (2) policy choices made by the imposer, (3) the prevailing domestic conditions within states hosting the imposed polity, and (4) the international environment within which the host state is embedded. Employing a sample of ninety-four imposed polities during the period 1816—1994 to test expectations from the framework, we find, in part, that ethnoreligious heterogeneity coupled with democratic institutions, preimposition military defeat, colonial experience, dissimilarity of neighboring political institutions, hostility from neighboring states, and the presence of the imposing state each stimulate political instability. The analysis suggests a bleak prognosis for domestic peace in postinvasion Afghanistan and Iraq as the causal factors that militate against domestic stability are manifold and likely reinforcing.

The poliheuristic (PH) theory of decision making has made important contributions to our understanding of political decision making but remains silent about certain key aspects of the decision process. Specifically, PH theory contends that leaders screen out politically unacceptable options, but it provides no guidance on (1) the crucial threshold at which leaders reject options as politically unacceptable, (2) whether this threshold varies across leaders and situations, and, (3) if so, which factors shape variation in this threshold. We integrate PH theory with research on political leadership and decision context and derive hypotheses from this modified PH framework. An experimental test reveals that situational context and leadership style affect both (1) the ``noncompensatory threshold'' at which decision makers reject options as politically unacceptable and (2) how much decision makers rely on their constituents' views in making policy choices. We conclude that a modified PH theory incorporating these insights will have enhanced explanatory and predictive power.

There is a substantial literature that has linked past acts of violence to investment. In this article, we argue that the appropriate mechanism linking violence to investment is investor perceptions of risk, in which forward-looking investors attempt to predict the likelihood of future political violence. We take advantage of a new data source—the price paid by investors to purchase risk insurance coverage—to more accurately capture how risk is assessed in investment decision making. Building on the civil war literature, we offer a broad explanatory model of variation in violence risk in the developing world. After controlling for recent past experiences with violence, we find that wealth and democracy significantly affect the perception of risk, whereas demographic factors and natural resource endowments have limited, if any, influence.

While a great deal of attention has been to paid to whether or not economic sanctions work, less energy has been devoted to exploring the causal mechanisms that lead to the success or failure of sanctions policies. Often, it is assumed that the population is one important source of political costs for targeted leaders, but this assumption has not been tested. Are sanctions related to an increase in antigovernment activity? How does the domestic political system of the targeted state affect the likelihood of this antigovernment behavior? The findings presented here suggest that sanctions may increase antigovernment activity, but that increase is mitigated by the domestic political structures of the target state. In autocratic targets, political violence is less likely to occur when sanctions are in place. For sanctions against autocratic states to be costly, it appears that the political costs needed to alter behavior must be generated internationally rather than domestically.

Much work has explored decision making under stress in political leadership. Less work has attempted to link the enormous emotional pressure of crisis with both the heightened sense of political accountability and responsibility and the increased need for social support under such circumstances. The authors examine the impact of political accountability, and the nature and quality of individual social support, on the relative performance of five central Israeli leaders on the second day of the Yom Kippur War. Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan and the Commander of the Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Shmuel Gonen, performed very poorly, whereas Prime Minister Golda Meir and Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. David Elazar performed very well. The Commander of the Northern Command, Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Hofi, performed adequately. The authors account for these divergences in performance based on individual differences in personal accountability and available social support networks.

Does the dramatic rise of the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) worldwide make economic sanctions more likely through increasing the leverage of the powerful and pitting states against each other in competition (power) or less likely through increasing the benefits of trade, resolving disputes, and promoting like-minded communities (plenty)? The authors offer the first systematic test of these propositions, testing hypotheses on sanctions onset using a data set of episodes from 1947 through 2000. In favor of the plenty argument, increases in bilateral trade do decrease sanctioning behavior; in favor of the power argument, an increase in the potential sanctioner's GDP or centrality in the network of all PTAs make sanctioning much more likely. However, mutual membership in PTAs has no direct effect on the propensity of states to sanction each other.

This special issue seeks to move forward the development of an empirical research agenda that takes seriously the complexity of how international organizations (IOs) function and the need to study that complexity at all levels of analysis by using robust research tools. We advocate for a broad empirical research approach that molds and sharpens theories about IOs by conducting systematic tests in large-sample environments. Two themes create a common thread throughout this issue. First, shifting the focus from whether IOs matter to how they work requires acknowledgment of the contingency of cause and effect. A second common thread lies in the authors' treatment of IO membership as an aggregate phenomenon—that is, as a set of institutions and relationships evolving over time and with many members rather than as a single organization.

Most research on congressional consideration of foreign and defense policy concludes that ideology is the most important influence on roll-call voting and that constituent economic interests are not very important. This article challenges this conclusion on two grounds. First, most previous research conceives of constituent economic interests on these issues very narrowly, examining only the benefits constituents obtain from providing military goods and services rather than their economic stakes in the broader goals of national security policy. Second, the effect of ideology on congressional voting has changed enormously over time, a fact that poses difficulties for research that has stressed this consideration. The effects of broader economic interests and the changing implications of ideology are tested using a sample of key Senate votes on military resource allocation, intervention, and foreign aid from 1947 through 2000.