The relationship between foreign trade and political conflict has been a persistent source of controversy among scholars of international relations. Existing empirical studies of this topic have focused on the effects of trade flows on conflict, but they have largely ignored the institutional...

Scholars of international relations have devoted remarkably little attention to the issue of why and when states enter international organizations (IOs). We argue that states have particular reason to enter IOs during the process of democratization. In the midst of a democratic transition, state...

We examine how domestic political factors influence the type of regional integration arrangement (RIA) that states enter. States can pursue at least five types of RIA, in order of their depth of policy integration: preferential trade agreements, free trade areas, customs unions, common markets...

Scholars and policymakers alike have recently begun to tout the ability of international organizations (IOs) to encourage and secure democracy throughout the world. Despite this stance, little theoretical attention or empirical investigation has attempted to ascertain why or whether this...

Working during the third week of NATO's bombing campaign against Serbia (in April 1999), the authors analyzed events data from the Kosovo conflict for January 1998 through January 1999. The authors expected the Serbian government's actions toward Kosovo to show an inverse-triangular response to...

Does bilateral reciprocity or great-power influence (or both) promote the emergence of international cooperation in regional conflicts? Using machine-coded events data and vector autoregression, time-series analysis of 12 international dyads in the Middle East between 1979 and 1990 and 1991 and...

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....

Over the past fifty years, barriers to international trade have decreased substantially. A key source of this decline in protectionism has been the proliferation of agreements among countries to liberalize commerce. In this article, we analyze the domestic political conditions under which states...