Showing papers in "International Studies Quarterly in 1997"

The Classical Liberals Were Right: Democracy, Interdependence, and Conflict, 1950–1985

Abstract: The liberals believed that economic interdependence, as well as democracy, would reduce the incidence of interstate conflict. In this article, we test both their economic and their political prescriptions for peace, using pooled-regression analyses of politically relevant dyads for the Cold War era. We find that the pacific benefits of trade, both total and dyadic, have not been sufficiently appreciated. We also offer clear evidence that democracies are relatively unlikely to become involved in militarized disputes with other democracies, while autocracies and democracies are prone to conflict with each other. Since democratic dyads are more peaceful than autocratic dyads, it follows that democracies are more peaceful than autocratic states generally, ceteris paribus. Previous research at the national level of analysis, which led most to conclude that democracies have been no more peaceful than other states, did not consider that the incidence of conflict depends importantly upon the number of contiguous states, the character of their political regimes, and other factors. In addition, we find no evidence that states that have recently undergone regime changes, whether in the democratic or autocratic direction, are particularly conflict prone. Our results suggest the basis for a broader formulation of expected–utility theories of interstate conflict.

Prospect Theory, Rational Choice, and International Relations

Abstract: A half-decade after the first systematic applications of prospect theory to international relations, scholars continue to debate its potential utility as a theoretical framework. Key questions include the validity of the experimental findings themselves, their relevance for real-world international behavior that involves high-stakes decisions by collective actors in interactive settings, and the conceptual status of prospect theory with respect to rational choice. In this essay I assess theoretical and methodological debates over these issues. I review work in social psychology and experimental economics and conclude that challenges to the external validity of prospect theory-based hypotheses for international behavior are much more serious than challenges to their internal validity. I emphasize the similarities between prospect theory and expected-utility theory, argue that hypotheses regarding loss aversion and the reflection effect are easily subsumed within the latter, and that evidence of framing effects and nonlinear responses to probabilities are more problematic for the theory. I conclude that priorities for future research include the construction of hypotheses on the framing of foreign policy decisions and research designs for testing them; the incorporation of framing, loss aversion, and the reflection effect into theories of collective and interactive decision making; and experimental research that is sensitive to the political and strategic context of foreign policy decision making.

States, NGOs, and International Environmental Institutions

Abstract: Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly important participants in international environmental institutions. NGOs have been formally—but not fully—incorporated into what were previously “states-only” activities. This article surveys these new participatory roles and offers an analytical framework for understanding the pattern, terms, and significance, for international theory, of NGO inclusion. NGOs are distinctive entities with important skills and resources to deploy in the process of international environmental cooperation. Rather than undermining state sovereignty, active NGO participation enhances the abilities of states to regulate globally. The empirical pattern of NGO participation has been structured across time and functional areas to reap these gains. Recent evidence from the restructuring of the World Bank's Environment Facility is used to test these claims. That NGOs are now more pervasive in international environmental institutions illustrates the expansion, not the retreat, of the state in addressing global environmental problems.

You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR Theorists

Abstract: This article reconstructs some conversational encounters between feminists and IR theorists and offers some hypotheses as to why misunderstandings so frequently result from these encounters. It claims that contemporary feminist perspectives on international relations are based on ontologies and epistemologies that are quite different from those that inform the conventional discipline. Therefore, they do not fit comfortably within conventional state-centric and structural approaches to IR theorizing, nor with the methodologies usually employed by IR scholars. As an illustration of how these differences can cause misunderstandings, the article offers some feminist perspectives on security, a concept central to the discipline. It also suggests how feminist approaches can offer some new ways to understand contemporary security problems. In conclusion, it suggests how feminist/IR engagements might be pursued more constructively.

Fools Suffer Gladly: The Use of Economic Sanctions in International Crises

Abstract: A number of recent international situations have raised again questions regarding the usefulness of economic sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy. Sanctions continue to be applied in a variety of contexts, yet we have not developed a sufficient understanding of the processes involved to determine when, or even if, sanctions can "work." While a great deal has been written on the subject, there have been neither attempts to subject the theoretical arguments to empirical testing nor efforts to provide systematic theoretical explanations for the empirical results that have been produced. In this article, we attempt to address this shortcoming in the literature. We propose a theory of sanctions effectiveness that is based on the spatial model of bargaining in international crises and use this theory to derive a number of hypotheses regarding when sanctions should produce favorable policy outcomes. We then subject some of the derived hypotheses to an empirical test based on a large number of international disputes. The model suggests that while sanctions will not work in many cases, they can have a slight effect on the distribution of expected outcomes if the costs of the sanctions are sufficiently high relative to the values at stake. The available evidence appears to support these expectations.

Ethnicity Matters: Transnational Ethnic Alliances and Foreign Policy Behavior

Abstract: This article investigates the influence of transnational ethnic alliances on the international interactions of states. Transnational ethnic alliances exist when both states in a dyad contain members of the same ethnic group. We argue that two types of dyads will experience higher levels of conflict than other dyads: (1) those where an advantaged minority in state A has an ethnic tie to a nonadvantaged minority in state B, and (2) those with a transnational ethnic alliance where the group in one of the states is politically mobilized. Using data from the COPDAB, Minorities at Risk, Polity II, COW, and Penn World Tables projects we find support for these contentions.

Images in International Relations: An Experimental Test of Cognitive Schemata

Abstract: We build on the tradition of studying images in international relations by developing a theory of perceived relationships and their associated images. The psychological theory is connected to a set of assumptions drawn from international relations theory that suggest perceived strategic relationships can be conceived of as a function of perceived relative power, perceived culture, and the perceived threat or perceived opportunity that a subject believes another actor represents. We hypothesize that perceived relationships evoke both cognitive and affective processes that lead to at least four ideal typical images. We further hypothesize that enemy, ally, colony, and degenerate images have identifiable and interrelated components. We test to see if the component parts of these images are related to each other, if the overall image affects the processing and interpretation of new information, and if strategic foreign policy choices follow from the cognitive and affective aspects of the image. The findings indicate that three of the four images are unified schemata, used even by inexperienced analysts. We find further that affect in combination with cognition does predict policy choice in the case of the enemy image. We suggest that image theory is a promising means by which foreign policy and international relations may be fruitfully studied.

Realist Environment, Liberal Process, and Domestic-Level Variables

Abstract: This article examines the deductive basis upon which domestic-level theorizing may be combined with liberal and realist systemic-level theory in order to account for international outcomes. It is particularly concerned with whether existing systemic theory can incorporate domestic-level variables in a causally consistent rather than ad hoc manner. In addressing such a concern, it confronts the widely held assumption in the IR theory literature that liberalism is more accommodating of domestic-level variables and their potential causal impact than is realism. When the deductive logic of systemic liberal and realist theory is examined, however, it becomes clear that domestic-level variables can be consistently causal in systemic realist theory, but are accorded little causal weight in systemic liberal theory. The article concludes that realism is actually more accommodating of domestic-level variables and theorizing than is liberalism. Given the common misconceptions within the field regarding the relationship between systemic theories and domestic-level theorizing, issues of theoretical causal compatibility must be considered if domestic-level variables are going to be incorporated in a rigorous rather than ad hoc manner.

Across the Great Divide: Integrating Comparative and International Politics

Abstract: Research in comparative and international politics often deals with the same questions, such as the nature of war, the conduct of foreign economic policy, and the consequences of different political institutions. Yet there is a pronounced gap between these two subfields of political science. In neorealist theory, this gap is to be expected, since the structure of the international system cannot be reduced to facts about its component units. Given the incompleteness of international relations theory, it rarely provides knowledge that is sufficient to explain the actions of the component units. This theoretical insufficiency provides the motivation to bring theories of domestic and international politics closer together. Three attempts to integrate comparative and international politics are discussed in this article. The first derives from the logic of two-level games as originally advanced by Robert Putnam. The second relies on a special application of second-image reversed theory by Ronald Rogowski in Commerce and Coalitions. The third examines the merging of previously distinctive systems of rules and laws among countries in the European Union. This approach does not rely on a single exemplar (as do the first two) but uses a number of institutional and legal theories to conceptualize the domestification of a regional, international political system. Thus, strategic interaction, the domestic effects of international trade flows, and institutional merging of legal systems provide three quite different metaphors for narrowing the gap between our knowledge of domestic and of international politics.

Opposites Do Not Attract: The Impact of Domestic Institutions, Power, and Prior Commitments on Alignment Choices

Abstract: States that choose to involve themselves in an ongoing dispute do so by choosing to align with or against one of the original disputants. What factors lead states to prefer to help one side over the other? We consider the effect of the disputants' power, political and economic institutional similarities between each disputant and the aligning state, and formal alliance commitments between each disputant and the aligning state on these alignment choices. We evaluate these expectations empirically by examining the alignment choices of states that joined with one side or another in a Militarized Interstate Dispute during the period of 1816 to 1986. The results indicate that regardless of regime type, institutional similarities matter to the aligning state's decision. We also find that power concerns matter only to autocracies; democracies do not seem to base their alignment choices on the power of the sides in the dispute. Finally, the evidence indicates that the alignment choices of democracies cannot be anticipated by their prior alliance commitments, although the alignment choices of autocracies can. These results suggest interesting implications for research on the democratic peace, the determinants of threat in the international system, and the impact of selection effects. The consistent empirical evidence that institutional similarity affects alignment decisions also increases our confidence that future investigations of institutional similarity generally, rather than an exclusive focus on joint democracy, will prove fruitful.

Lobbying as a Private Good with Intra‐Industry Trade

Abstract: Intra-industry trade—trade in different varieties of the same product between countries with similar factor endowments—has been an important and surprising feature of the postwar international economy. Economists have explained this trade with models of monopolistic competition, which suggest that intra-industry trade does not have the stark distributional consequences that the more traditional “endowments-based” trade does. I do not dispute that claim here, although I do dispute a political implication drawn from it—that intra-industry trade produces less political action than endowments-based trade. I argue that, because firms involved in intra-industry trade are monopolists, lobbying essentially becomes a private good . If intra-industry trade places costs on firms, they do not have less incentive to take political action to stop it, as the conventional wisdom suggests. I provide evidence for this contention from complaints lodged with the International Trade Commission. The results show that the higher the degree of intra-industry trade the more likely an industry will request protection from the ITC.

Domestic and Systemic Determinants of Capital Controls in the Developed and Developing World

Abstract: This paper examines the utility of and preference for controls on short-term capital. Recent work in international political economy has argued that the increasing internationalization of finance has constrained the ability of governments to pursue independent monetary policies. For the most part this conclusion has been reached through an examination of a small number of advanced industrialized countries. This article argues not only that the globalization of finance is far from all-encompassing but also that domestic forces play a more significant role in explaining the implementation and removal of capital controls than do systemic factors. Capital controls are more likely to be put in place by governments that repress the financial sector, that choose to maintain a fixed exchange rate, and that are facing balance-of-payments crises. These propositions are tested using a random effects probit model on a panel of ninety-one countries from 1967 to 1992.

Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: Elite Beliefs as a Mediating Variable

Abstract: Scholars have become increasingly interested in the nature of potential linkage processes between public opinion and foreign policy. The literature on elite beliefs suggests that the beliefs decision makers hold concerning public opinion may have an important influence on this relationship. This article argues that how decision makers perceive and react to public opinion depends upon their views of the proper relationship between public opinion and foreign policy choices. A theoretical framework to analyze beliefs is suggested containing two dimensions: (1) normative beliefs relating to whether it is desirable for input from public opinion to affect foreign policy choices; and (2) practical beliefs regarding whether public support of a policy is necessary for it to be successful. To explore this issue, this article reports the findings of a qualitative content analysis of Dwight D. Eisenhower's and John Foster Dulles's public opinion beliefs. Predictions of behavior are tested in a case study of the September 1954 Chinese offshore islands crisis. The results of this analysis suggest elite beliefs regarding public opinion may provide an important intervening variable worthy of further examination.

Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia

Abstract: Over 5,000 years of history, the effective number of separate political entities has decreased from close to a million to 24, if going by geographical area, and from about a thousand to 15, if going by population. These changes have followed interconnected exponential patterns which extrapolate to a single world polity around year 4000. Within this long-term trend, three sudden increases in polity sizes occur: around 3000 BC, 600 BC, and AD 1600. This study tests the exponential model against area and population data for five millennia. It also gives tables and graphs of area versus time for all major polities since AD 600. The median duration of large polities at more than half the peak size has been 130 years, and it has not changed over 5,000 years. Polities that expand slower tend to last slightly longer. The prospects of the Moscow-centered state are discussed in the light of these findings.

Hierarchy Amidst Anarchy: A Transaction Costs Approach to International Security Cooperation

Abstract: interested actors voluntarily curtail their sovereignty to obtain needed assurances, yet that these actors have a choice among cooperative security arrangements with different degrees of "bindingness." The key,to understanding countries' international institutional choices is in focusing on economic theories of organization and, more specifically, transaction costs. The study begins with the conceptualization of a continuum of cooperative security arrangements with different degrees of bindingness. It then examines different bodies of literature-the traditional realist model and economies-of-scale arguments-and claims that both fail to account for hierarchical security structures in the international system. Recognizing that economists explain hierarchy amidst market anarchy by examining transaction costs, the study makes use of this insight by developing an analogous argument for hierarchy in international politics. Finally, to test the propositions advanced in this article, a brief case study examines plans for the creation of a European Defense Community.

Theory and the Politics in World Politics

Abstract: Many of the competing intellectual traditions and research programs in world politics share a core set of metatheoretical assumptions about the process of strategic interaction in politics. Their differences are anchored in different empirical assumptions about the types of issues, actors, political arenas, and strategic situations that characterize world politics, not in different metatheoretical assumptions about how the process of politics works. Systematically identifying these shared assumptions will help eliminate many false problematics that have entangled the field, create a positive heuristic for research that can link international and domestic politics, and move political scientists toward more general theories of world politics. Building research programs around widely shared metatheoretical principles about how politics works will, moreover, increase the ease with which scholars can communicate their insights to nonacademic audiences. The frequently bitter theoretical debates that divide political science mask widespread, if largely unrecognized, agreement about a series of fundamental dynamics that shape the process of strategic interaction in politics. These political dynamics are, in effect, a set of "first principles" about how the process of politics works. Converting these implicit principles about strategic interaction into an explicit, systematically articulated set of metatheoretical assumptions will eliminate many false problematics that entangle existing debates about politics, liberating scholars to study patterns that transcend different political arenas, issues, actors, and historical periods.

Deadly Doves: Liberal Nationalism and the Democratic Peace in the Soviet Successor States

Abstract: This article's purpose is to assess the arguments of democratic peace scholars as they apply to the states of the former Soviet Union. The claim that liberalism is associated with nonviolent means of conflict resolution, in particular, is questionable in the case of newly independent states, in which liberalism bears a closer resemblance to nineteenth-century European liberal nationalism than it does to the universalist liberalism envisioned by theories of the democratic peace. I argue that this nonuniversalist form of liberalism is in fact widespread among the Soviet successor states and that, as a result, liberalism's implications for peace are not nearly as benign as had previously been believed. In other regards, however, the attitudes of elites, the mass public, and liberals are in fact fairly consistent with those posited by democratic peace theory, though relative elite bellicosity declines as the policy-making arena broadens. A democratic peace in the region is therefore viable but particularly vulnerable to national issues, as well as to the effects of concentration of political power in the hands of a narrow group of elites.

A New Dynamism in World Politics: Increasingly Skillful Individuals?

Abstract: Our inquiry is the first phase of a project designed to explore systematically whether individuals are becoming more equipped to play a central role in world affairs. It hypothesizes that individuals have undergone a skill revolution, leading them to be more analytically competent, emotionally capable, and politically effective in assessing events, developing alternatives, and executing effective political action. The first phase is confined to the skills of elites: we tested the predicted generational changes by analyzing the skills of three types of individuals—elected officials in the U.S. Congress, witnesses at congressional hearings, and contributors to the daily press in three countries—in two widely separated epochs as they evaluated events across three issue areas—foreign affairs, international trade, and human rights. In doing so we randomly selected nearly one thousand paragraph-sized statements and coded them according to the methodology prescribed by the Integrative Complexity Coding Manual. All in all, our findings supported the hypothesis: the skill level of the sampled individuals was found to have increased over several generations by a statistically significant (P < .001) average greater than 10 percent. Each issue area also showed gains in the same direction between the two epochs and across all types of elites; and all of these results also met the 95 percent confidence level for statistical significance. Inasmuch as this finding does not negate the possibility of a long-term trend toward more capable publics, it points to the need for further research into the dynamics whereby world politics may become increasingly sensitive to demands at the micro level.

Indo-Pakistani Relations: Reciprocity in Long-Term Perspective

Abstract: This article examines the foreign policy behavior of two rival states, India and Pakistan. Previous studies of this dyad reveal competing causal claims concerning the nature of Indian and Pakistani relations. I argue that Indian and Pakistani foreign policy behavior exhibits strong short-term relations in the context of long-term “memories” that shape future expectations of their bilateral relations. The results indicate that reciprocity in Indo-Pakistani relations is shaped by a long-term equilibrium and suggest a reconceptualization of the nature of the Indo-Pakistani relations. The findings highlight the legacy of suspicions between these two countries, providing sober insights into the possibilities for reducing conflict and promoting cooperation in South Asia.

The Great Powers and Regional Conflicts: Eastern Europe and the Balkans from the Post–Napoleonic Era to the Post–Cold War Era

Abstract: The objective of this article is to provide an analytical framework for addressing the sources of great power regional involvement and its effects on regional conflicts. The thesis of the article is that variations in the degree of intensity of conflicts and the likelihood of successful conflict resolution in different regions are affected by the character of great power involvement in these regions. Our argument is that although great power involvement or noninvolvement cannot cause or terminate regional conflicts, it can either intensify existing local conflicts or mitigate them. We will propose causal linkages between balances of great power capabilities and interests, types of great power involvement in regional conflicts, and patterns of regional conflicts. The study will distinguish among four types of great power involvement in regional conflicts: competition, cooperation, dominance, and disengagement. The empirical section will examine the application of these propositions in seven historical illustrations, representing the four patterns of great power involvement in regional conflicts. All the illustrations will deal with one conflict-ridden region—Eastern Europe and the Balkans, in successive historical periods from the post-Napoleonic era to the post-Cold War era. Because of the variety of patterns of great power involvement in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, this region is uniquely suited to examine the propositions derived from the theoretical framework. Drawing on both the theoretical deductions and the historical illustrations should make it possible in the last section to discuss briefly the implications of the proposed framework for regional conflict management or mitigation in the Balkans in the post-Cold War era.

Economic Interdependence and the Balance of Power

Abstract: To account for variance in great powers' responses to threats and the implications for the peacefulness of the international system since the late nineteenth century, this article elucidates a theory which refines and synthesizes economic liberal perspectives and realist balance of power theory. I argue that different patterns and levels of economic interdependence in the great power system generate societal-based economic constraints on, or incentives for, state leaders of status quo powers hoping to mobilize economic resources and political support to oppose perceived threats. This mobilization process influences strongly the preferences of status quo powers, other states beliefs about those preferences, and the interpretation of signals in balance of power politics. In this way, economic ties influence the strategies great powers pursue. Firm balancing policies conducive to peace in the international system are most likely, I then hypothesize, when there are extensive economic ties among status quo powers and few or no such links between them and perceived threatening powers. When economic interdependence is not significant between status quo powers or if status quo powers have strong economic links with threatening powers, weaker balancing postures and conciliatory policies by status quo powers, and aggression by aspiring revisionist powers, are more likely. I then illustrate how these hypotheses explain the development of the Franco-Russian alliance of the 1890s and its effectiveness as a deterrent of Germany up to 1905, British ambivalence toward Germany from 1906 to the First World War, the weakness of British, French, Soviet, and American behavior toward Germany in the 1930s and World War II, and the American and European responses to the Soviet threat, including the NATO alliance, and the "long peace" of the post-1945 era.

Ballotbox Diplomacy: The War Powers Resolutiona and the Use of Force

Abstract: The strategic problem for the United States during the lead-up to a potential military clash is maintaining the executive's ability to respond internationally while not abrogating legislative oversight of the use of force. In light of this dilemma, congressional leaders have an incentive to engage in “stage management”: establishing short-term contracts with the executive that shift political risk during conflict onto the president while maintaining a final check on presidential policy. The War Powers Resolution is a useful test of the stage management model and an alternative model that derides congressional involvement in the use of force as nothing more than symbolic politics. We find that the War Powers Resolution changed the process by which Congress opposes the presidential use of force, easing congressional collective-action problems and minimizing the electoral repercussions associated with said confrontation. Moreover, presidents have used force differently since the resolution's passage. By changing both process and outcomes, the War Powers Resolution fulfills all the requirements of a stage management contract.

Domestic Costs, the U.S. Public, and the Isolationist Calculus

Abstract: This article examines and tests two models of the circumstances shaping the extent of the American public&;apos;s isolationist sentiment. The first, termed the “elastic band” model, assumes a constant popular disinclination toward foreign involvements, one that may, at most, temporarily be stretched to accommodate responses to major external threats. A second model assumes the operation of a “cognitive shortcut” based on low-information rationality. It proposes that acceptable levels of domestic involvement depend on the gravity of the domestic opportunity costs of foreign involvement, and it is termed the “domestic costs” model. While the former model implies a constant public resistance to international activism, a resistance that is relaxed only in proportion to the gravity of external threats, the latter model suggests that the U.S. public displays a relatively constant internationalist attitude, and that variations around that threat are largely explained by fluctuations in the perceived domestic opportunity costs of international involvement. Both models are subjected to statistical testing, a testing that vindicates the domestic costs model. Further insights are obtained by examining attitudes toward internationalism as they are affected by levels of education. Although internationalism increases with education, and although levels of education predict differential impacts of the variables encompassed by the model, each segment of the public seems to operate within the general parameters of the “domestic costs” model.

Assessing State Preferences and Explaining Institutional Choice: The Case of Intra–German Trade

Abstract: A solid knowledge about states' interests in the case under investigation is required to reinforce the neoinstitutionalist hypothesis that international institutions are built to reap joint gains in issue areas in which uncoordinated activities may lead to a suboptimal outcome. However, most neoinstitutionalists who apply game theory to international politics seem to assume that, regardless of the outcome to be explained, no case–specific empirical assessment of actors' interests is needed to understand regime formation. This article aims to empirically assess the constellation of state interests on the basis of which the intra–German trade regime came into existence. Furthermore, solution concepts are used merely as indicators for describing a situation, they are not taken as unqualified predictions of what will happen. This application of game theory still proves useful. By demonstrating that the intra–German trade regime emerged from a constellation of interests resembling a prisoner's dilemma, the neorealist argument that international institutions are unable to regulate important issues in a really competitive relationship is challenged. At the same time, the article points to at least one necessary addition to the neoinstitutionalist argument, as the explanation of given international institutions requires a two–step procedure: first, the explanation of state interests, and second, the explanation of behavior brought to light on the basis of these interests.

Factoral or Sectoral Conflict? Partially Mobile Factors and the Politics of Trade in Imperial Germany

Abstract: Several recent attempts to understand the politics of trade liberalization and expansion have come under criticism for the way they employ different economic models to identify the positions of domestic political actors. The two approaches most popular among political scientists are the Stolper-Samuelson theorem and the factor-specific model. Each of these economic models builds on extreme assumptions, and each therefore exhibits shortcomings. Rather than engage in a debate purely over the merits and flaws of each, this article builds on the work of Gene Grossman to show that an avenue exists for the development of political models that can encompass both of these approaches, but go beyond the limitations of each as well. I then apply a simpler version of this sort of model to the case of German party politics at the turn of the century to illustrate its potential.

Why State Subsidies? Evidence from European Community Countries, 1981–1986

Abstract: In this article I seek to explain why European Community members subsidized a substantial portion of their economies in the period 1981–1986. I test three competing explanations: socioeconomic, party control, and world markets. Parties have an impact on overall state subsidies and loans, but trade deficits are most influential in the disbursement of direct budget outlays and tax incentives. Unemployment has no effect on subsidies. The differential responsiveness to trade and parties is likely to frustrate efforts toward greater European integration.

The Limited Test-Ban Agreement: Emergence of New Knowledge Structures in International Negotiation

Abstract: An analysis of cognitive maps constructed from exchanges between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev on the test–ban issue suggests cultural differences in the basic knowledge structures used to represent political reality. Soviet negotiators, including Premier Khrushchev, use“processual”representations, while U.S. negotiators, including President Kennedy, use“procedural”representations. A comparison of the negotiations over time reveals the emergence of new knowledge structures that were hypothesized to facilitate an agreement on nuclear testing. A related discovery, that Kennedy and Khrushchev“translate”each other from procedural to processual and vice versa, provides additional evidence for the shared reality–building process that may be a precondition for successful negotiation.

Energy in the World Economy, 1950-1992

Abstract: Trends in energy production, trade, and consumption during 1950‐1992 are analyzed, using nine world regions to highlight both North-South energy trade and the regions’ differing patterns of industrialization. Following price shocks in 1973 and 1979, and the price drop of the mid-1980s, the industrialized West adjusted its patterns of energy consumption and imports, and the Middle East changed its level of exports. These relationships suggest a cobweb-type model with an equilibrium price for Mideast oil around $30/barrel. This equilibrium could result in zero growth in energy consumption in the industrialized West but continued growth of GDP as energy efficiency increases. Energy prices that are “too high” reduce GDP growth in the short term—to the detriment of both energy importers and exporters—while prices that are “too low” lead in the long term to high dependency on Middle East oil exports, which, in turn, depends on an elusive and costly political stability in that region. The analysis highlights the central role of North-South energy trade in the world economy, and the close but changing relationship of energy with overall GDP growth.

The Foreign Policy Beliefs of Political Campaign Contributors

Abstract: Since the Vietnam War, scholarly interest in public and elite opinion of U.S. foreign policy has grown. Because elites generally have greater access to policy makers and more consistent political views, most work on this topic has focused on elite opinions of foreign policy. Most research has defined the term elite broadly, often placing more emphasis on social status than political power. We will reexamine elite foreign policy beliefs using a different elite, presidential campaign contributors. We have two main goals in this article. First, we will assess the differences between the foreign policy outlooks of political campaign contributors and other elites. While many types of elites may influence policy, political contributors are particularly likely to gain access to policy makers. The second part of this research note offers some food for thought on the origins of these beliefs. We present evidence that foreign policy beliefs are related to the same ideological orientations that shape contributors' views on domestic issues. The origins of foreign and domestic policy views should probably be considered together.

Regulations as Arbiters of Risk: Great Britain, Germany, and the Hazardous Waste Trade in Western Europe

Abstract: This article seeks to explain why Great Britain is one of the world's largest importers of hazardous wastes, while Germany, in contrast, is a waste exporter. Why one country exhibits such risk-acceptance behavior, while another is so risk averse, I argue, depends on differences between their national systems of environmental regulation. The style and structure of Britain's regulatory system, unlike that of Germany and its other partners in Western Europe, gives a high degree of leeway to private firms, filtering out the preferences of environmental groups and public opinion, thus enabling and facilitating the importation of hazardous wastes by waste disposal companies. The empirical section tests this argument against two alternative explanations: a state-centric explanation based on individual governments' calculations of the relevant costs and benefits associated with the waste trade, and second, a "comparative advantage" explanation, based on the technological superiority of Britain's waste disposal facilities. The conclusion draws out the implications for international environmental regulation and for domestic-level regulatory change. Great Britain is one of the world's largest importers of hazardous wastes. It has maintained this position throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, during which time its waste imports steadily increased.1 Nearly all of this trade is legal, in the sense that its importation has the knowledge and consent of the British government, and the majority of waste imports come from other developed countries, especially Britain's partners in the European Union. By way of contrast, Germany, one of these partners, is one of the world's largest waste exporters, despite its strong environ