The rapid growth of trust funds at multilateral development organizations has been widely neglected in the academic literature. We examine sovereign donors' choices among various trust fund options and contend that the choice among the different trust funds involves a fundamental trade-off: larger funds provide donors with “burden-sharing” benefits, but each donor can better assert its individual preferences in a fund with fewer other donors. The theoretical considerations yield testable hypotheses on a range of factors affecting this fundamental trade-off, most notably the area of the trust fund's intervention and donor countries' competing domestic interests. A large-N analysis of participation decisions of OECD/DAC donors in trust funds over the past decade mostly corroborates these hypotheses. In particular, ex ante preference alignment among donors as well as indicators for global activities and fragile states aid are robust determinants of participation in (large) multi-donor funds. In contrast, a donor tends to prefer a single-donor fund in areas where its national interests dominate.

Since the Second World War complex and changing sets of norms and rules have governed trade relations among most countries. They have largely originated from a unique and accidental international organization, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). We have labeled these norms, rules, and decision-making mechanisms the GATT regime or global trade barriers regime. The importance that GATT members have attached to certain norms has shaped the regime's procedural mechanisms, rules, and implementation of rules. Classifying those norms as sovereignty or interdependence norms, we posit that the strength or autonomy of the regime can be established by analyzing the prominence of the interdependence norms in the issue area. We close by exploring some of the functions of the regime in international trade and political relations.

Is it possible to integrate states into larger unions without the use of force? Should we think of a continuous “federalizing process” in which economic integration is a first step? Are there certain conditions under which economic integration of a group of nations automatically triggers political unity?

A substantial international relations literature addresses the various ways in which international actors, and the norms they promote, influence state behavior. But less attention has been paid to the influence these actors directly exert at the local level, despite the fact that many transnational campaigns promote norms for which individuals—not states—are the primary transgressors. If individuals behave as some states do, publicly embracing international norms only because they expect a financial or reputational benefit from doing so, then the campaigns have not fully succeeded. But when do individuals engage in real behavior change, and when do they simply change the public image they present to the international community? To begin to address this question, I employ a randomized field experiment to evaluate individuals' willingness to make claims that differ from their true normative commitments. I conducted the experiment in the context of an original 2008 opinion survey about female genital mutilation and early marriage, run in rural Kenya. I find that respondents misrepresent their behavior and intentions, and I supplement these findings with an exploration of causal mechanisms through qualitative interviews.

Canonical models of costly signaling in international relations (IR) tend to assume costly signals speak for themselves: a signal's costliness is typically understood to be a function of the signal, not the perceptions of the recipient. Integrating the study of signaling in IR with research on motivated skepticism and asymmetric updating from political psychology, we show that individuals’ tendencies to embrace information consistent with their overarching belief systems (and dismiss information inconsistent with it) has important implications for how signals are interpreted. We test our theory in the context of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran, combining two survey experiments fielded on members of the American mass public. We find patterns consistent with motivated skepticism: the individuals most likely to update their beliefs are those who need reassurance the least, such that costly signals cause polarization rather than convergence. Successful signaling therefore requires knowing something about the orientations of the signal's recipient.

Traditional accounts of U.S. tariff policy emphasize trade strategies and interest group politics. This article makes a departure. It opens with an observation: up until World War I, the tariff was the largest single source of federal government revenues. It then explores the significance of tariffs as taxes, theoretically and empirically.

In its first part, the article develops a theory of taxation politics and applies it to the tariff. In its second part, it submits the theory to an empirical test, modeling changes in U.S. tariff rates from 1829 to 1940. The politics of tariff revision, it argues, followed from two characteristics of the tariff as tax: from the extent of the treasury's dependence upon it and from the distributive pattern of its burdens and benefits. Taken together, the article concludes, revenue dependence and distributive incidence account for several diverse aspects of American tariff policy, including the structure of its coalitions, the shifts in its objectives, and the timing of its innovations.

International organizations (IOs) increasingly pool resources and expertise. Under what conditions do they pool rather than compete when their activities overlap? Drawing on elite interviews, I argue that even though many cooperation decisions are made by staff possessing high degrees of autonomy from member state principals, IOs are more likely to pool resources when their leading stakeholders are geopolitically aligned. Regardless of whether member states directly oversee the negotiation of these arrangements, staff design policies that are amenable to major stakeholders. I test this argument with regression analysis of an original data set that documents patterns of co-financing and information sharing among IOs in the development issue area. I further supplement these tests with an elite survey experiment deployed via LinkedIn to bureaucrats from various development IOs. Across the board, I find evidence consistent with my theory.

Since Munich, appeasement—a policy of making unilateral concessions in the hope of avoiding conflict—has been considered a disastrous strategy. Conceding to one adversary is thought to undermine the conceder's reputation for resolve, provoking additional challenges. Kreps, Wilson, Milgrom, and Roberts formalized this logic in their 1982 solutions to the “chain-store paradox.” I show with a series of models that if a state faces multiple challenges and has limited resources, the presumption against appeasement breaks down: appeasing in one arena may then be vital to conserve sufficient resources to deter in others. I identify “appeasement” and “deterrence” equilibria, and I show that when the stakes of conflict are either high or low, or when the costs of fighting are high, only appeasement equilibria exist. I illustrate the result with discussions of successful appeasement by Imperial Britain and unsuccessful attempts at reputation-building by Spain under Philip IV.I thank Rui de Figueiredo, Jim Fearon, Tim Groseclose, David Laitin, Ed Mansfield, James Morrow, Barry O'Neill, Bob Powell, Lawrence Saez, Ken Schultz, Art Stein, Marc Trachtenberg, Romain Wacziarg, Justin Wolfers, and other participants in seminars at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the 2002 American Political Science Association meeting for helpful comments.

The significance of the European Communities (EC) remains obscure. The reason is that orthodox integration literature is fundamentally ahistorical: it fails to give an adequate account of the roots of modern European integration. And however admirable the project might be in itself, we cannot rectify the failure simply by chronicling the admittedly much ignored origins of the EC in the 1950s. For the EC is systematically connected to earlier cases of integration in Europe. Only by understanding the evolution of these integrational forms—from early modern Britain, to nineteenth century Germany, to contemporary Europe—can one begin to make sense of the EC. In brief, one must seek to understand the “present as history,” a task that few writers on regional integration have yet attempted, and none with any success.

Holy Land Crusades were among the most significant forms of military mobilization to occur during the medieval period. Crusader mobilization had important implications for European state formation. We find that areas with large numbers of Holy Land crusaders witnessed increased political stability and institutional development as well as greater urbanization associated with rising trade and capital accumulation, even after taking into account underlying levels of religiosity and economic development. Our findings contribute to a scholarly debate regarding when the essential elements of the modern state first began to appear. Although our causal mechanisms—which focus on the importance of war preparation and urban capital accumulation—resemble those emphasized by previous research, we date the point of critical transition to statehood centuries earlier, in line with scholars who emphasize the medieval origins of the modern state. We also point to one avenue by which the rise of Muslim military and political power may have affected European institutional development.

How do powerful states control international organizations (IOs)? In contrast to the conventional wisdom that treats weighted voting rules as the primary means that powerful states use to codify their asymmetric control in institutional design, we propose that funding rules are equally important. Our framework develops a logic of substitution whereby permissive earmark rules—that allow donors to stipulate how their contributions to an IO are used—are a design substitute for weighted voting from wealthy states’ perspective. Whether asymmetric control is incorporated in design through voting or funding rules depends on whether egalitarian norms emphasizing political and legal equality, or shareholder norms emphasizing influence commensurate with financial power, govern voting and representation rights at the IO. Focusing on the domain of climate finance, we demonstrate that weighted voting rules are used at international climate finance institutions (ICFIs) associated with multilateral development banks, but that wealthy states pursued permissive earmark rules at ICFIs within the United Nations system where egalitarian norms are strong. In this way, powerful donors can exert control over resource allocation even when developing states appear to hold equal influence on governing bodies. In addition to providing a reassessment of how power translates into control at IOs, our framework offers insight into forum-shopping behavior and sheds light on substitution dynamics that involve other dimensions of design across a range of issue areas.

This article examines how European Union member states make choices about political institutions at intergovernmental conferences, the grand negotiations where many key institutional changes are made. Using data on member-state preferences from the intergovernmental conference leading to the Treaty of Amsterdam, I test competing bargaining theories, institutionalism, and intergovernmentalism, and present strong evidence that institutionalism better captures negotiations compared to intergovernmentalism. I present a formal model to discern between these competing theories of bargaining power, derive a statistical model directly from this formal model, and then use data from the European Union's Treaty of Amsterdam to test these theories and corresponding power sources. Veto power associated with institutional models better explains intergovernmental conference outcomes compared to power from size and economic might, often associated with intergovernmental analyses.I would like to thank Kathy Bawn, Julia Gray, Tim Groseclose, James Honaker, Joe Jupille, Thomas König, Jeff Lewis, Sven-Oliver Proksch, George Tsebelis, and the participants in UCLA's graduate student formal theory and statistical methods workshops for their insightful comments on various drafts of this article. I am also grateful for the comments from several anonymous reviewers and the editors at International Organization. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 2006. Data and replication material are available at 〈http://faculty.unlv.edu/jslapin〉.

A prominent explanation of war claims that international conflict can result when shifts in bargaining power induce the declining power to behave aggressively today because the rising power cannot credibly commit to not behave aggressively tomorrow. This paper asks whether individuals respond to shifting power in ways assumed by these models. Rather than use abstract laboratory-based bargaining games as in other work, I use vignettes describing the United States in an international bargaining situation to explore the microfoundations of power transitions models empirically. The vignettes vary whether the individual is a member of a declining or a rising power and whether there are previous public commitments to the status quo division of territory. Subjects propose a response the United States should make and then explain their decision in their own words. I apply new methods for analyzing these open-ended responses. Consistent with predictions from the behavioral literature, I find important asymmetries in behavior across these conditions as well as substantial heterogeneities in individuals' motivations for their decisions. The results of the experiments suggest potential ways that power-transition models should be refined to have a firmer behavioral basis.

At the end of the 1940s, the United States and several West European states allied to defend themselves against invasion by the Soviet Union. Balance-ofpower theory predicts the recurrent formation of such balances among states. But it says little about the precise nature of the balance, the principles on which it will be constructed, or its institutional manifestations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been a peculiar mix. As a formal institution, NATO has through most of its history been distinctly nonmultilateral, with the United States commanding most decision-making power and responsibility. At the same time, NATO provided security to its member states in a way that strongly reflected multilateral principles. Within NATO, security was indivisible. It was based on a general organizing principle, the principle that the external boundaries of alliance territory were completely inviolable and that an attack on any border was an attack on all. Diffuse reciprocity was the norm. In the terms set out by John Ruggie, NATO has generally scored low as a multilateral organization but high as an institution of multilateralism.

While emotions are widely regarded as integral to the “behavioral approach” to International Relations (IR), a host of fundamental problems have delayed the integration of affective influences into traditional models of IR. We aim to integrate affect by focusing on commitment problems, a body of work that contains strong theoretical predictions about how individual decision makers will and should act. Across two lab experiments, we use a novel experimental protocol that includes a psychophysiological measure of emotional arousal (skin conductance reactivity) to study how individuals react to changes in bargaining power. While we find support for one key pillar of IR theory—individuals do reject offers when they expect the opponent's power to increase—we also find that physiological arousal tampers with individuals’ ability to think strategically in the manner predicted by canonical models. Our follow-up experiment mimics the elements of institutional solutions to commitment problems and finds support for their efficacy on the individual level. Our novel findings suggest that when individuals face large power shifts, emotional arousal short-circuits their ability to “think forward and induct backwards,” suggesting that emotionally aroused individuals are less prone to commitment problems.

Structural international theory has become largely a matter of elaborating “the effects of anarchy.” Simple hunter-gatherer band societies, however, perfectly fit the Waltzian model of anarchic orders but do not experience security dilemmas or warfare, pursue relative gains, or practice self-help balancing. They thus demonstrate that “the effects of anarchy,” where they exist, are not effects of anarchy—undermining mainstream structural international theory as it has been practiced for the past three decades. Starting over, I ask what one needs to differentiate how actors are arranged in three simple anarchic orders: forager band societies, Hobbesian states of nature, and great power states systems. The answer turns out to look nothing like the dominant tripartite (ordering principle, functional differentiation, distribution of capabilities) conception. Based on these cases, I present a multidimensional framework of the elements of social and political structures that dispenses with anarchy, is truly structural (in contrast to the independent-variable agent-centric models of Waltz and Wendt), and highlights complexity, diversity, and regular change in the structures of international systems.

Although international relations scholarship emphasizing the role of social constructs such as norms and culture has established a beachhead in the area of security studies, it has yet to take on another bastion of the rational materialist approach: studies of coercive international bargaining. Scholarship in this area, ranging from the work of Thomas Schelling to James Fearon, has long argued that bargaining outcomes reflect the material costs and benefits faced by participants in negotiations. Participants can influence outcomes, these models assume, only through tactics such as credible threats and side payments that reshape the material context of negotiations.

International institutions help governments make credible commitments to other state and nonstate actors by raising the costs of commitment violation. However, in doing so these institutions generate sovereignty costs for national governments by constraining the autonomy they have to develop and implement policy. Governments respond to this trade-off between the credibility of commitments and policy autonomy differently depending on their time horizons and this shapes their preferences over the design of credibility-enhancing institutions. Governments with long time horizons expect to govern in the future, anticipate that conditions may shift over time, and therefore seek institutional designs that will afford them greater freedom to modify policies in response to changing economic and political conditions. Governments with shorter time horizons, on the other hand, do not anticipate being in power long into the future and therefore are less concerned about maintaining greater room to manipulate policy. I develop this argument in the context of bilateral investment treaties (BITs), focusing in particular on the legalization of obligation in national treatment commitments. I test the argument using an original data set of the design of national treatment obligations in a random sample of 342 BITs. I find that net importers of FDI with longer time horizons are more likely to build in greater policy autonomy in their BITs by scaling back the legalization of their national treatment obligations and that this relationship is robust to controlling for selection into investment treaties.

This article investigates the politics of sovereign borrowing in Europe over the very long run. I consider three alternative hypotheses regarding the sources of borrower credibility. According to the first, European states with constitutional checks on executive authority found it easier to obtain credit at low interest rates than did states that lacked such constraints. My second hypothesis focuses on state type (city-state versus territorial state) and the way in which this may have influenced the balance of political power between owners of land and owners of capital in a society. This hypothesis suggests that after controlling for other factors, one should observe that city-states in Europe found it easier to borrow than did larger territorial states, and that these city-states paid lower interest rates on their debt. Finally, my third hypothesis suggests that borrower credibility depended on the simultaneous presence of both constitutional checks and balances and a city-state. When one considers a broad sample of cases over a long time span there is strong support for the proposition involving city-states and merchant power, but less support for the argument that constitutional checks influenced credibility regardless of state type (city-state or territorial state). There is, however, some empirical evidence of an interaction effect whereby constitutional constraints on rulers made city-states particularly credible as borrowers. My results are robust to a number of controls for alternative determinants, for sample selection bias, and for the endogeneity of city-state development.I would like to thank Robert Fannion, Jeff Frieden, Peter Gourevitch, Lisa Martin, Adam Przeworski, Ronald Rogowski, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Ken Scheve, Mike Tomz, Nikki Velasco, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at Stanford and UCLA for comments on a previous draft. This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK).