World Politics

As governmental activity has expanded, scholars have been increasingly inclined to suggest that the structure of public policies has an important influence on patterns of political change. Yet research on policy feedback is mostly anecdotal, and there has so far been little attempt to develop more general hypotheses about the conditions under which policies produce politics. Drawing on recent research, this article suggests that feedback occurs through two main mechanisms. Policies generate resources and incentives for political actors, and they provide those actors with information and cues that encourage particular interpretations of the political world. These mechanisms operate in a variety of ways, but have significant effects on government elites, interest groups, and mass publics. By investigating how policies influence different actors through these distinctive mechanisms, the article outlines a research agenda for moving from the current focus on illustrative case studies to...

Electoral competition is necessary but not sufficient for the consolidation of democratic regimes; not all elections are free and fair; nor do they necessarily lead to actual civilian rule or respect for human rights. If there is more to democracy than elections, then there is more to democratization than the transition to elections. But in spite of the rich literature on the emergence of electoral competition, the dynamics of political transitions toward respect for other fundamental democratic rights is still not well understood.

This paper examines how government policies affect inter-ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania. Despite similar geography and colonial legacies, post-independence governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different language, education, and local institutional policies, with Tanzania consistently pursuing more serious "nation-building". The evidence in this paper indicates that the Tanzanian approach has allowed diverse communities in rural western Tanzania to achieve considerably better local public goods outcomes than diverse communities in the Kenyan region. To illustrate, while Kenyan communities at mean levels of diversity have 25 percent less school funding than homogeneous areas on average, the comparable figure in the Tanzanian district is near zero and statistically insignificant. The Kenya-Tanzania comparison provides empirical evidence that, in the long-run, serious reforms can ameliorate social divisions, and suggests that nation-building should take a place on government policy agendas, especially in Africa.

The Globalization of World Politics
An Introduction to International Relations

Seventh Edition

Edited by John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens

A must have text for anybody and everybody interested in the ongoing Globalization of World Politics. Besides the fact that it has been the market-leading introduction to International Relations, written by more than 35 unrivaled experts in their fields.
Building their breathtaking narrative on thorough knowledge and careful academic research of national and international history, the book offers a bigger picture of main stream theories international relations. No global structures and processes, and international issues were left unattended. It provides an inquisitive and the most comprehensive coverage of International Relations in the Twentieth and the Twenty-first centuries. 

The editors: John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens, did their best to ensure an integrated and coherent style throughout the book.

Integrated and interactive learning features, including case studies and questions, a brand new debating feature and end of chapter questions, are all carefully tailored to the needs of students approaching IR for the first time.
The Online resources available give lecturers and their students an extra indispensable tool for highly efficient knowledge production and exchange. 

The brand new chapters including Feminism, Race, International Organizations, and NGOs leave no issue unattended and permit timely broaden the scope of the study.
The entire book encourages students to apply theory to real world events never getting tired of careful intellectual exercises. Great variety of well-founded opinions helps students to critically evaluate an argument.
Many thanks to Oxford University Press
for giving to all of us this very precious opportunity.

Dr. Asatiani Jumber

Moscow, Russia.

The authors construct a statistical model with which to test whether the regularity that democracy is more commonly found among wealthy countries stems from a democratizing effect of high income or is due entirely to other factors, such as the historical context, various features of the institutional setting, and simultaneity with the process of leadership change. Even after correcting for these many other influences, the democratizing effect of income remains as a statistically significant factor promoting the emergence of democratic political institutions. The authors go on to find that leaders' risks of losing power rise during their time in office and that these risks are higher in more democratic countries.The authors confirm the finding by Burkhart and Lewis-Beck that the democracy-promoting effect of income is stronger among the European countries. They suggest that high income has a more powerful democratizing effect among the Southern European countries because it inter...

While paradigm-bound research has generated powerful insights in international relations, it has fostered a tunnel vision that hinders progress and widens the chasm between theory and policy. In this important new book, Sil and Katzenstein draw upon recent scholarship to illustrate the benefits of a more pragmatic and eclectic style of research, aimed at adjusting and integrating causal mechanisms drawn from different analytic traditions for the purpose of generating usable knowledge concerning specific substantive problems.

PRAISE:

"This is the future of political science. Sil and Katzenstein convincingly demonstrate that drawing on an eclectic mix of causal mechanisms provides stronger explanations, more policy-relevant scholarship, and closer connections to other disciplines." —Andrew Bennett, Georgetown University

“For international relations scholars, methodologists, and social scientists more broadly, this is a treasure trove of bold and lucid arguments. The question: How to overcome compartmentalization in international relations scholarship? The strategy: incorporate ideas and analytic tools from seemingly incommensurable research traditions. The reward: a richer interpretive and explanatory understanding of today’s world.” —David Collier and Ron E. Hassner, University of California, Berkeley

“An exceptional book that should be read by every serious student of world politics. For researchers already combining elements from different approaches with neither roadmap nor rationale, it fills a long-standing lacuna. Even those who disagree with such a research strategy will benefit greatly from engaging with its thoughtful arguments and impressive range of examples.” —Colin Elman, Maxwell School of Syracuse University

"A giant step forward for those of us who span the boundaries between theory and practice. The singular contribution of this important volume is to show how “analytical eclecticism,” as Sil and Katzenstein call it, can be systematized and does not need to rely upon individual intuition or shared folk tales. It will deservedly have an enormous impact on the study of world politics." —John Gerard Ruggie, Harvard University and United Nations

"For two decades, the field of international relations has been a prisoner of the misconceived notion that good scholarship falls neatly into incompatible paradigms. Sil and Katzenstein cogently document the value of eclectic work that borrows from more than one paradigm but remains analytically rigorous. Our conceptual jail has no locks, and if we refuse to exit, we have only ourselves to blame." —Robert O. Keohane, Princeton University

Many scholars attribute China's market reforms and the remarkable economic performance they have fostered in part to the country's polit ical and fiscal decentralization. Political decentralization is said to have stimulated local policy experiments and restrained predatory central interventions. Fiscal decentralization is thought to have motivated local officials to promote development and harden enterprises' budget constraints. The locally diversified structure of the pre-reform economy is said to have facilitated liberalization. Reexamining these arguments, we find that none establishes a convincing link between political or fiscal decentralization and China's successes. We suggest an alternative view of the reform process in which growth-enhancing policies emerged from competition between promarket and conservative factions in Beijing.

of USAID for their support and assistance to this project, and Michael Bratton, Michael Coppedge and Pamela Paxton for expert advice and criticisms along the way. For more information about the project, see www.pitt.edu/~politics/democracy/democracy.html. sectoral dimensions. Thus, we show the impact of elections assistance on countries' level of free and competitive electoral processes, the impact of civil society assistance on the freedom and independence of countries' civil society sector, the impact of governance assistance on governance-related democratic outcomes, and so forth. None of these kinds of analyses for the overall assessment of democracy promotions efforts have been conducted previously.

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In determining how he will behave, an actor must try to predict how others will act and how their actions will affect his values. The actor must therefore develop an image of others and of their intentions. This image may, however, turn out to be an inaccurate one; the actor may, for a number of reasons, misperceive both others’ actions and their intentions. In this research note I wish to discuss the types of misperceptions of other states’ intentions which states tend to make. The concept of intention is complex, but here we can consider it to comprise the ways in which the state feels it will act in a wide range of future contingencies. These ways of acting usually are not specific and well-developed plans. For many reasons a national or individual actor may not know how he will act under given conditions, but this problem cannot be dealt with here.

Dominant theoretical approaches in political economy today, whether they posit convergence to neo-liberal capitalism, binary divergence of capitalisms, or tripartite differentiation of financial governance, downplay the importance of state action. Their methodological approaches, rational choice and historical institutionalism, tend to reinforce their substantive theories either by disaggregating the state into its historical institutional components or by focusing on the strategic actions of its rational actors. This paper argues that by not taking state action seriously, they are unable to explain the differences in degree and kind of countries' neo-liberal reforms. For this, we need to bring the state back in, and to put the political back into political economy not just in terms of political economic institutions but also in terms of policies, polity, and politics. To explore the political in all its variety, however, the paper demonstrates that we also need at least one more methodological approach, discursive institutionalism, which, by taking the role of ideas and discourse seriously, brings political actors as sentient beings back in. This in turn also enables us to explain the dynamics of neo-liberal reform in political economy.

How does power work in practice? Much of the ‘stuff’ that state agents and other international actors do, on an everyday basis, remains impenetrable to existing International Relations theory. This is unfortunate, as the everyday performance of international practices actually helps shape world policy outcomes. In this article, we develop a framework to grasp the concrete workings of power in international politics. The notion of ‘emergent power’ bridges two different understandings of power: as capability or relation. Emergent power refers to the generation and deployment of endogenous resources — social skills and competences — generated in particular practices. The framework is illustrated with an in-depth analysis of the multilateral diplomatic process that led to the 2011 international intervention in Libya. Through a detailed account of the negotiations at the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the European Union, the article demonstrates how, in practice, state representatives translate their skills into actual influence and generate a power politics that eschews structural analysis. We argue that seemingly trivial struggles over diplomatic competence within these three multilateral organizations played a crucial role in the intervention in Libya. A focus on practice resituates existing approaches to power and influence in International Relations, demonstrating that, in practice, power also emerges locally from social contexts.

9 moreover, most of the electoral changes since the early 1990s have tended to disadvantage the smaller unorthodox parties (e.g., raising electoral thresholds in countries like Poland and romania), while the most prominent change in political system-moldova's switch from a presidential to a parliamentary system-should have also promoted stable party competition.

Although the case-based literature suggest that kin groups are prominent in ethnonationalist conflicts, quantitative studies of civil-war onset have both over-aggregated and under-aggregated the role of ethnicity, by looking at civil war at the country level instead of specific groups and treating individual countries as closed units, ignoring actors' transnational links. In this paper, we integrate transnational links into a dyadic perspective on conflict between marginalized ethnic groups and governments. We argue that transnational links can increase the risk of conflict as transnational kin support can facilitate insurgencies and are difficult for governments to target or deter.

Emotions play an increasingly important role in international relations research.  This essay briefly surveys the development of the respective debates and then offers a path forward.  The key challenge, we argue, is to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political.  We further suggest that this is done best by exploring insights from two seemingly incompatible scholarly tendencies: macro theoretical approaches that develop generalizable propositions about political emotions and, in contrast, micro approaches that investigate how specific emotions function in specific circumstances.  Applying this framework we then identify four realms that are central to appreciating the political significance of emotions: 1) the importance of definitions; 2) the role of the body; 3) questions of representation; and 4) the intertwining of emotions and power.  Taken together, these building blocks reveal how emotions permeate world politics in complex and interwoven ways and also, once taken seriously, challenge many entrenched assumptions of international relations scholarship.

ment of items on the agenda, with the "imposition" stage then proceeding either through extraordinary powers wielded by the government (for example, the vote of confidence) or through the marshaling of party discipline by all the partners-or through some combination of the two. 2 Here we stress that cartels tend to allocate to their own members a controlling share of those official posts to which substantial agenda-setting powers are attached (ministers, committee chairs, speakers, conferees).

Wage setting has been one of the most heavily studied institutions in the field of comparative political economy over the past two decades, and quantitative measures of wage-setting arrangements have played a major role in this research. Yet the proliferation of such measures in recent years presents researchers with a sizable array from which to choose. In addition, some scholars are rather skeptical about the validity and/or reliability of these measures. This article offers a survey and assessment of fifteen wage-setting measures. It attempts to answer questions about (1) how these indicators differ from one another in conceptualization and measurement strategy; (2) which are the most valid and reliable; (3) the strengths and weaknesses of measures of wage centralization versus those of wage coordination; (4) particular countries or time periods for which there are noteworthy discrepancies in scoring; (5) how sensitive empirical findings are to the choice of wage-setting measure.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the post-communist transformation is the tremendous variation in rates of economic growth across countries. To account for these differences, this essay develops an alternative to the J-curve and partial reform views that currently dominate discussions of the politics of economic reform. This approach treats economic performance as a political struggle between ex-communist and anti-communist factions engaged in a "war of attrition" over economic and political resources. Using a pooled time-series analysis of economic growth across 25 post-communist countries for the period 1990-1998, it finds that political polarization between ex-communist and anticommunist factions has had a devastating effect on economic growth. Where these competing factions have had roughly equal power and have struggled over the economic rules of the game -as in Bulgaria or Ukraine -economic growth has been slow. In contrast, where either ex-communist or anti-communist factions have dominated the political scene -as in Estonia or Uzbekistan -economic performance has been much better. In addition, economic growth has followed the electoral calendar in polarized countries. As elections approach and the odds of a change in economic policy increase, growth rates have plummeted in polarized countries. These findings have implications for studies of the post-communist transformation, the political business cycle, and the politics of economic reform more generally.

A FTER surveying the research on international capital mobility and capital taxation in his recent book on globalization, Duane Swank concludes: "The weight of the evidence leads to the unanticipated impression that international capital mobility may be unrelated (or even positively related) to capital taxation." 1 This is arguably one of the most important and, as Swank notes, unexpected findings to come out of the literature on globalization. The debate over capital taxation, perhaps more than any other, clearly divides those who are pessimistic about the domestic political consequences of globalization and those who believe governments still have substantial room to maneuver in the global economy.

This paper contributes to recent discussions of corporate tax avoidance and global wealth chains. Drawing on multiple case studies, we outline the key strategies adopted by Finnish mining companies as they seek to lower their tax burden. After screening the accounts of the companies mining metallic ores in Finland, we provide an in-depth analysis of the tax avoidance arrangements at three of these mines. The mines were operated by two Canadian enterprises that utilized seven different tax avoidance arrangements. The multiple case study approach adopted in this paper is helpful in developing both quantitative and qualitative tax avoidance research, since our findings highlight major deficiencies of datasets commonly used in the dominant quantitative tax avoidance research. Our qualitative approach helps tackle some of the limitations imposed on tax researchers as a result of the considerable secrecy surrounding tax matters. In particular, we argue that the existing tax avoidance research has focused too much on statutory corporate income tax rates even though today, tax minimization relies mostly on specific tax incentives and other loopholes in tax laws. We argue that the arrangements we describe mirror a wider phenomenon where multinational enterprises exert societal power commonly associated with sovereign states. Crossing the disciplinary boundaries of accounting, political economy and tax law, we also contribute to the emerging research agenda on global wealth chains. We call for more attention to the intersections between accounting and tax law for understanding how enterprises can separate their value chains from the intra-firm flows of wealth.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045235417300084

Considering the recent 'temporal turn' in International Relations scholarship, this article proposes that space and time are concepts that 'thicken' one another in several ways, with significant implications for understanding foreign policy and world politics. In the discourse of security and governance, space-time frames work together to facilitate and legitimize certain policies, actions, and reactions, and imply distinct perspectives on ethics. Drawing on the examples of United States (US) drone use, reactions to the event that has become known as 'Benghazi', and fears of the global spread of disease, this study investigates how temporal and spatial framings conceptualize effective and ethical security and governance. Arguing that space-time frames take shape from the resonance of political, theoretical, and cultural texts, four frames are elaborated including 'space-time libera-tions', 'space-time oppressions', 'space-time strategics', and 'space-time reflexivities'. The article concludes by suggesting that contradictions and tensions between the frames along with postcolonial and decolonial perspectives can be leveraged to interrogate and displace dominant notions of pace and space in the practice and study of world politics, and that this is a form of scholarly and political reflexivity.

Twenty-five years after the collapse of communism in Europe, few scholars disagree that the past continues to shape the democratic trajectories of postcommunist states. Precommunist education has featured prominently in this literature’s bundle of “good” legacies because it ostensibly helped foster resistance to communism. The authors propose a differentcausal mechanism—appropriation and subversion—that challenges the linearity of the above assumptions by analyzing the effects of precommunist literacy on patterns of Communist Party recruitment in Russia’s regions. Rather than regarding precommunist education as a source of latent resistance to communism, the authorshighlight the Leninist regime’s successful appropriation of the more literate strata of the precommunist orders, in the process subverting the past democratic edge of the hitherto comparatively more developed areas. The linear regression analysis of author—assembled statistics from the first Russian imperial census of 189...

TThis paper seeks to explain cross-national variations in patterns of firm-level adoption of two supranational environmental management system (EMS) standards: the European Union's Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) and the International Standards ...

H. G. Wells was one of the most influential writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Most famous today as a founder of modern science fiction, he was once known throughout the world as a visionary social and political thinker. Questions of global order were central to his work. From the opening decade of the century until the close of the Second World War, he campaigned tirelessly for the creation of a world state, characterised by universal peace and justice. Yet scholarship on Wells has paid insufficient attention to the complex and conflicted nature of Wells’s early views about how to build a world state, and in particular the tensions between his advocacy of a New Republic, formed by the unification of the English-speaking peoples, and his support for liberal imperialism. In this essay I analyse the development of this key theme in Wells’s political thinking. I demonstrate how his views on race, empire, and Anglo-American union shifted over time, show how his political arguments connected to his underlying views about social explanation and language, and highlight how his interpretation of the United States had a profound influence on his ideas about world order.

This paper focuses on the role of contemporary art in international relations and world politics. In IR, art is often examined within the framework of cultural diplomacy, country branding, and soft power, or approached as a site of resistance. We argue that the concept of heteronomy offers an alternative conceptual framework for analysing contemporary art in world politics. It highlights the interaction of various fields such as art, commerce, the state and media. We concretise this approach with an analysis of the Venice Biennale. We show that the Biennale is heteronomous in the sense of being an arena where actors from various fields struggle for power by accumulating different types of capital. We focus our analysis on the Russian national pavilion in 2011–2015 and show how the efforts of the country’s elite to legitimise its position are intertwined with the projects of the state, sponsors, artists, curators and art market actors.

In an effort to contribute to the dialogue between gender studies and international studies, this report presents findings from an empirical investigation based on the integrated secondary analysis of survey data from Israel, Egypt, Palestine, and Kuwait. The goal is to assess the utility of both gender and attitudes pertaining to the circumstances of women in accounting for variance in views about war and peace, and thereafter to examine the degree to which political system attributes constitute conditionalities associated with important variable relationships. Major findings include the absence of gender-linked differences in attitudes toward international conflict in all four of the societies studied and a significant relationship in each of these societies between attitudes toward gender equality and attitudes toward international conflict. Based on data from the Arab world and Israel, with attitudes about a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict treated as the depende...

In an historical materialist analysis, the article challenges the dominant understanding of global academic rankings as 'inevitable' and 'here to stay'. Instead, rankings are treated as historically transformative 'tracings' over the accumulation of capital in the world-system, and thus offer a contingent strategic response to three historical shifts in global political economy: 'financialization', displacement of the Core, and an shift to surplus 'appropriation' in the core. By understanding these transformative shifts as elements of an historic 'inversion' of the global frontier of capitalization, the argument: (1) connects global rankings to neoliberal capitalism; (2) challenges the utopian view of rankings as instruments of marketization; and most specifically (3) opens up a space between frontiers of appropriation and commodification proper, indicating how rankings exist in a historically transient and politically dialectical space of hybrid outcomes, imperfect commodifications, and indirect subjections, that are bound to the contradictions of accumulation in contemporary world history.

This paper explains how several Gulf rentier monarchies have managed to create highly profitable and well-managed state-owned enterprises (SOEs), confounding expectations of both general SOE inefficiency and of the particularly bad quality of rentier public sectors. I argue that a combination of two factors explains the outcome: the absence of a populist-mobilizational history and substantive regime autonomy in economic policy-making. We need to rethink both our generalizations about rentier states and, arguably, about public sectors in the developing world.

Do elections reduce or increase the risk of autocratic regime breakdown? This article addresses this contested question by distinguishing between election events and the institution of elections. The authors propose that elections stabilize autocracies in the long term but at the price of short-term instability. Elections are conducive to regime survival in the long run because they improve capacities for co-optation and repression but produce short-term instability because they serve as focal points for regime opposition. Drawing on data from 259 autocracies from 1946 to 2008, the authors show that elections increase the short-term probability of regime failure. The estimated effect is retained when accounting for the endogeneity of autocratic elections; this finding is critical, since some autocrats may or may not hold elections because of perceived effects on regime survival. The authors also find that this destabilizing effect does not operate in the long term. They find some, a...

The causes of international migration have been the focus of much scholarly attention. Existing work, however, tends to focus on single countries-either on the origin or destination side-which leads to conclusions that are not broadly generalizable. We make two main arguments: First, the existence and volume of migrant social networks, which provide information and support to would-be migrants, are key to understanding the perpetuation of migration flows. Second, a host of economic and political factors are important for explaining migration, and these operate independent of and also in conjunction with network effects to influence migration patterns. These arguments are tested on an original dataset comprised of migration flows from 165 origin countries into 19 destination countries over the period 1960-2004. The roles played by of social networks in shaping migration decisions are further analyzed with individual level survey data.