Institutional Opposition, Regime Accountability, and International Conflict

Can international organizations constrain a leader’s behavior during a military crisis? Existing studies have shown that joint membership in international organizations reduces the likelihood of dispute initiation; however, whether institutional opposition can prevent an ongoing conflict from escalating has yet to be investigated. We develop and test a theory of how domestic politics provides a mechanism through which international organizations can reverse the course of a military crisis. The argument leads to the hypothesis that more accountable regimes are less likely to escalate military crises when an international organization opposes their actions. We test the hypothesis with an analysis of territorial disputes from 1946 to 1995. We find that while neither institutional opposition nor the degree of regime accountability independently reduces the tendency for a country to escalate a conflict, the joint effect of the two does

Greece illustrates how the politics of lending can undermine its effectiveness

Why do bailout packages often fail to restore market confidence? Outlining results from a recent study, Terrence Chapman, Songying Fang and Randall Stone write that creditor countries tend to have a special interest in the crisis country whose loans they are backing. Weaker conditionality applied to countries deemed to have high levels of importance, however, has counter-productive effects, with markets anticipating that easier access to credit may lead to further fiscal instability and recidivist borrowing. They argue that in the Greek case it will be difficult to rebuild the confidence of a market shaken by several failed attempts at stabilisation, and that the country will probably require another round of debt relief

International Organizations as Policy Advisors

How can international organizations persuade governments to adopt policy recommendations that are based on private information when their interests conflict? We develop a game-theoretic model of persuasion that applies regardless of regime type and does not rely on the existence of domestic constituency constraints+ In the model, an international organization ~IO! and a domestic expert have private information about a crisis, but their preferences diverge from those of the government, which must choose whether to delegate decision making to the expert+ Persuasion can take place if the international institution is able to send a credible signal+ We find that this can take place only if the preferences of the IO and the domestic expert diverge and the institution holds the more moderate policy position+ This result contrasts with conventional wisdom, which holds that the necessary condition for IOs to exert influence is support from a domestic constituency with aligned preferences. Our model suggests that, far from being an obstacle to international cooperation, polarized domestic politics may be a necessary condition for IOs to exert effective influence

Mutual optimism and war

W hy do states fight costly wars when less costly negotiated settlements are possible? Must there not be some mutually agreeable alternative to war that can produce the same result without incurring the social loss? Could not decision makers agree to distribute the disputed territory or assets in a way consistent with their beliefs about the likely outcome of conflict, saving both sides significant death and destruction? In this article, we address one specific rationalist answer to these questions. As Blainey (1988) intimates, the high hopes on the eve of war suggest a sad conclusion: wars only occur when both rivals believe they can achieve more through fighting than through peaceful means. How might this be so? Obviously, when two countries are involved in a war, if one side wins then the other loses. We might then conclude that at least one side, in particular the loser, would prefer some peaceful method of resolving the dispute if she were certain of the outcome. But war is an uncertain process. Given this uncertainty, the leaders of the two countries must each form expectations about the results of a conflict to guide their decision making. The Mark Fey is associate professor of political science, 109E Harkness Hall, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 (mark.fey@ rochester.edu). Kristopher W. Ramsay is assistant professor of politics, 033 Corwin Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 ([email protected]). Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University of Rochester, Columbia University, and NYU. We thank Scott Ashworth, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Songying Fang, Tanisha Fazal, Erik Gartzke, Shigeo Hirano, Adam Meirowitz, John Patty, Pablo Pinto, Robert Powell, Quinn Ramsay, Anne Sartori, Curt Signorino, Branislav Slantchev, Allan Stam, Randy Stone, and Robert Walker, as well as other seminar participants. We would also like to thank the editor of the AJPS and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Any remaining errors are our own. Kris Ramsay acknowledges financial support from NSF grant SES-0413381

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

International institutions and credible commitment of non-democracies

Non-democracies, Credible commitment, Economic reforms, The IMF, F53, O57, P33,

Unpacking "the west": Divergence and Asymmetry in Chinese Public Attitudes towards Europe and the United States

Journal of Current Chinese Affair

Compromised Peacebuilding 1

There is considerable evidence that peacebuilding operations are more likely to reproduce important elements of the status quo than they are to propel post-conflict states toward a liberal democracy. In contrast to existing theories that focus on the resources available to peacebuilders or the degree of damage caused by the war to explain the outcome, we highlight the interaction between international and domestic actors. Specifically, we conceive of peacebuilding as a strategic process involving peacebuilders, a postwar government, and other local elites. The equilibrium results show that this process typically concludes in a compromised peacebuilding outcome. This is not surprising when the policy preferences of the actors diverge, but the results also hold when domestic elites prefer a liberal democracy to the status quo. Why? Primarily, because postwar governments are rewarded by relatively impatient peacebuilders with more resources than they would otherwise receive. Additionally, if there exists a secondary elite with veto power, a compromised outcome becomes even more likely. We illustrate these findings with reference to post-1989 peacebuilding operations. Although peacebuilding might not work as it is intended, in the conclusion, we argue that it is better than the alternatives and propose a more realistic measure of peacebuilding success. The contemporary literature on peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and postconflict reconstruction is at odds on two fundamental issues. The first is whether peacebuilding makes a "difference." Scholars have arrived at an impressive and often contradictory array of conclusions, from peacebuilding works, it makes a modest difference, it is a waste of resources, to it does more harm than good. There are several reasons why such a basic question generates such wildly different assessments. There is remarkably little agreement on what counts as a "difference"-that is, what criteria should be used to evaluate the success or failure of a peacebuilding operation? Some insist that the gold, and only, standard is a liberal democracy, while others define success as a reduction in the likelihood of a return to war. There is an array of measurement issues, including what measure of democratization is appropriate for the postwar context. And there is the necessity of situating the outcome in relationship to the counterfactual: What would have occurred had there not existed an operation, if the operation had been configured differently, or if peacebuilders had made different choices? Although the jury is still out, the weight of the evidence is increasingly pointing to the conclusion that, if democracy is the measure of a successful outcome, peacebuilding has a poor track record (Jarstad and Sisk 2008; Diehl and Druckman 2010). Since 1989, the international community has launched 19 major peacebuilding operations: 2 Two countries emerged as liberal democracies, Michael Barnett is University Professor of Political Science and International Relations at George Washington University. He is the author, most recently, of Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism, and is completing a book on Jewish internationalism. Songying Fang is assistant professor of political science at Rice University. Her main research interests include the influence of international institutions on state behavior and domestic sources of international conflict. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, and Quarterly Journal of Political Science. Christoph Z€ urcher is a professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. He received his PhD. from the University of Bern, Switzerland. Previous teaching and research appointments include the University of Konstanz, Germany, the institut d' etudes politiques d'Aix-en-Provence, and Freie Universit€ at Berlin. His research and teaching interests include conflict, peacebuilding, and international development. His regional focus is on the Former Soviet Union, especially on Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia including Afghanistan. He is the editor of "Potentials of Disorder: Explaining Violence in the Caucasus and in the Former Yugoslavia" (Manchester UP, 2003) and the author of "The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict and Nationhood in the Post-Soviet Era (New York: University Press, 2007) and "Costly Democracy: Peacebuilding and Democratization after War" (Stanford, Stanford UP, 2013 Namibia (1989), Rwanda (1994), Sierra Leone (1999), and Tajikistan (1997). A major mission is defined as mandated by the UN or by another international organization, as having been deployed for at least 6 months, as having at least 500 military personnel, and as having a mandate to keep the peace and create a stable and democratic country. We code the start of a mission when these criteria are met (that is, a mission might have been deployed in an earlier version, but does not "begin" until it meets these criteria). Barnett, Michael, Songying Fang and Christoph Z€ urcher

Chinese Public Opinion about US-China Relations from Trump to Biden

Chinese Journal of International Politic