Wiley: International Studies Quarterly: Table of Contents

Binding Prometheus: How the 19th Century Expansion of Trade Impeded Britain’s Ability to Raise an Army

David M. Rowe, David H. Bearce, Patrick J. McDonald — 2003-02-17T12:00:00-08:00

This article explores how the dramatic expansion of British trade in the decades prior to World War I affected Britain’s ability to raise an army. We first develop a simple institutionally based model of British army recruiting which we then perturb by expanding trade while holding all other variables constant. Our theoretical analysis suggests that the expansion of trade would impede Britain’s ability to raise an army, a prediction that finds substantial support in the historical record using both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that trade enhances a state’s military power, we find that the expansion of trade did not ease Britain’s resource constraints by making labor more freely available for military purposes. Rather, by raising the civilian demand for labor, the expansion of trade made labor more expensive and difficult to mobilize, even as a more effective army became more important to British strategy.

Agricultural Biotechnology and Regime Formation: A Constructivist Assessment of the Prospects

William D. Coleman, Melissa Gabler — 2002-12-17T12:00:00-08:00

Controversies surrounding the appropriate use and diffusion of agricultural biotechnologies are giving rise to questions about governance at the international level. This article investigates the likelihood that a single, international regime or multiple regimes governing this technology will form by way of negotiation. We show that four normative–institutional arrangements, organized around distinct general principles, have a potential governance role: world food security and safety, liberalized trade, protection of intellectual property, and conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. We argue that an adequate amount of compatibility between the principles and norms of these arrangements is required to support the type of communicative action or truth–seeking needed to develop the intersubjective understanding for a regime. Using a framework for assessing normative compatibility, we find not one, but two nascent understandings rooted in the trade and biodiversity areas competing to form the foundation for governance. Further analysis of levels of institutional density between the two developing regimes reveals they are presently too low to support a negotiated resolution of normative conflict. Finally, we demonstrate that recent framing attempts at the international level to decrease areas of tension and incompatibility in principles/norms between the regimes have neglected to create the crucial normative background conditions needed to avert a scenario of increased political conflict in the near future.

The Dearth of Jointly Dyadic Democratic Interventions

John A. Tures — 2002-12-17T12:00:00-08:00

The Democratic Peace Proposition, which states that no two democracies have ever gone to war with each other, has been questioned by scholars who claim that such pacific behavior among free states does not apply to lower forms of conflict. In particular, Kegley and Hermann contend that democracies intervene in the affairs of other liberal states via overt military acts or covert machinations. In many cases, they argue that dyadic democratic interventions (DDIs) occur more frequently than would be expected given the number of jointly democratic dyads in the international system. I examine their research design and suggest changes to their concepts of states, interventions, and regime type, as well as their sample size and definition of dyads in the international system. I implement these changes and retest such arguments on a sample of interventions from 1945 to 1991. I find 11 cases where a democracy intervenes against another democracy, but these cases are rare in comparison to interventions conducted by democratic and/or autocratic states in undemocratic states, or by autocratic states against democratic states. Furthermore, these DDIs are less likely to occur than the presence of democracy in the international system would suggest.

U.S. Perceptions of Nuclear Security in the Wake of the Cold War: Comparing Public and Elite Belief Systems

Kerry G. Herron, Hank C. Jenkins–Smith — 2002-12-17T12:00:00-08:00

Our research adds new evidence to the continuing debate about capacities of mass publics to contribute to foreign and security policy processes. Focusing on U.S. beliefs and preferences about nuclear security in the post–Cold War era, we examine not only linear relationships among elite and mass belief structures, but also combinations of beliefs that may be precursors to policy coalitions. We examine attitudes and preferences about nuclear issues among two elite publics—scientists and legislators—surveyed in 1997, and among two samples of the U.S. general public surveyed in 1997 and 1999. We compare elite and mass belief structures using three different methods: descriptive comparisons of central tendencies, relational analyses using bivariate and multivariate regressions, and coalitional analyses using cluster analytical techniques. With each method of analysis we find evidence of similar belief structures and similar relationships between beliefs and nuclear policy preferences among our elite and mass samples.

Are Free Trade Areas Good for Multilateralism? Evidence from the European Free Trade Association

Daniel Yuichi Kono — 2002-12-17T12:00:00-08:00

Do free trade agreements (FTAs) help or hinder multilateral trade liberalization? This question, though much debated, remains unanswered because (1) there has been scant attention to the conditions under which FTAs have either effect, and (2) extant hypotheses have not been rigorously tested. In this article I identify conditions under which FTAs help and hinder broader trade liberalization: they do the former when members’ intra– and extra–FTA comparative advantages are similar and the latter when the opposite is true. I test these hypotheses using trade, output, and tariff data from the European Free Trade Association. The trade data indicate that members with similar intra– and extra–FTA comparative advantages liberalized trade more rapidly than those with dissimilar comparative advantages. The output and tariff data suggest that these differences among members reflect hypothesized economic and political processes. My research implies that scholars should abandon universalistic arguments concerning the effects of regional arrangements and devote more attention to the conditions governing the relationship between regionalism and multilateralism.

Incomplete Democratization and the Outbreak of Military Disputes

Edward D. Mansfield, Jack Snyder — 2002-12-17T12:00:00-08:00

Whereas most research on the democratic peace has focused on relations within pairs of states, research on the relationship between democratization and armed conflict has centered primarily on the behavior of individual states. Moreover, the existing literature has placed primary emphasis on explaining the effects of democratization on war, rather than military disputes more generally. In this article, we find that certain types of democratic transitions markedly increase the risk of such disputes within dyads, even when economic and political relations between states are taken into account. Particularly prone to violence are dyads in which either state undergoes an incomplete democratic transition; that is, a shift from an autocratic to a partially democratic (or anocratic) regime that stalls prior to the establishment of consolidated democratic institutions.

Contributors

2002-12-17T12:00:00-08:00

International Studies Quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 4, Page 591-592, December 2002.

Index to Volume 46, 2002

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International Studies Quarterly, Volume 46, Issue 4, Page 593-595, December 2002.