International bureaucrats must often serve multiple principals who collectively choose policy. How does this affect bureaucrats' incentives to truthfully reveal their private information? I construct a cheap talk model in which a bureaucrat possesses private information about how policies translate into outcomes. The bureaucrat can communicate publicly observable messages about this information to two policymakers, who must then bargain over a set of policy choices. I find that both the bureaucrat's willingness to communicate informatively and the choice of an optimal bureaucrat are highly contingent on the bargaining powers of the two policymakers. When each policymaker is bound to adhere to the bargaining outcome, “moderate” bureaucrats are most preferred. In contrast, when at least one policymaker can leave the bargaining table and exercise an outside option, “biased” bureaucrats can be optimal. I illustrate my findings by examining UN weapons inspections in Iraq from 1991 to 2003.I wish to thank Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Michael Gilligan, Catherine Hafer, Matias Iaryczower, Dimitri Landa, Adam Meirowitz, Alastair Smith, and the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Previous drafts of this article were presented in the New York University Politics Department Research Workshop and the 2006 Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association.

Why did the United States intervene in World War I, breaking with its long tradition of noninvolvement in European political and military conflicts? During the 1920s and 1930s, many “revisionist” historians argued that American efforts to protect its trade with the Allies ultimately led to intervention. The logic of the revisionist position closely parallels the contemporary liberal case that interdependence promotes peace but arrives at different conclusions about the relationship between trade and conflict. Historians have largely abandoned this economic interpretation of American intervention, but data on the impact of the wartime export boom on the United States suggest that it should be reconsidered. The export boom was so large that it would have been difficult to ignore, and its progress corresponds to the timing of important decisions leading to American belligerency. An analysis of congressional voting on war-related measures also suggests that export income helped shape politicians' views of the war.I would like to thank Katherine Barbieri, John Coogan, David Clark, Jeffry Frieden, Jack Levy, Brian Lai, Timothy McKeown, David Painter, Strom Thacker, and participants in the world politics workshop at Binghamton University, the political economy workshop at Harvard University, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for their many comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article. Lisa Martin and several anonymous reviewers at International Organization also made many valuable suggestions. I am especially grateful to Thomas Walker, whose good-natured skepticism prompted me to write this paper. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Any remaining errors and misinterpretations are my responsibility.

This article evaluates different theories of hierarchy in international relations through a case study of the treaty system that the British constructed in the early nineteenth century in an effort to abolish the slave trade. The treaty system was extraordinarily wide-ranging: it embraced European maritime powers, new republics in the Americas, Muslim rulers in northern and eastern Africa, and “Native Chiefs” on the western coast of Africa. It therefore allows for a comparative analysis of the various types of treaty that the British made, depending on the identity of their contracting partners. The article argues that a broadly constructivist approach provides the best explanation of why these variations emerged. Although British treaty-making was influenced by the relative strength or weakness of the states with which they were dealing, the decisive factor that shaped the treaty system was a new legal doctrine that had emerged in the late eighteenth century, which combined a positivist theory of the importance of treaties as a source of international law with a distinction between the “family of civilized nations” and “barbarous peoples.”Some of the arguments in this article were presented to a seminar at the University of Chicago, and I am grateful to members of the Political Science Department there for several valuable constructive criticisms. I would also like to thank Duncan Bell, Molly Cochran, Steve Hopgood, Andy Hurrell, Katja Weber, and the journal's two anonymous readers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the article.

The importance of sovereign bond ratings has grown recently as assessments by credit rating agencies (CRAs) influence the cost of capital. Understanding how CRAs determine country ratings is difficult based on the secretive nature of these agencies. Controlling for the common explanations in the literature, we use panel data and interviews to investigate the role of the “democratic advantage” and other determinants on bond ratings set by Moody's Investor Services, Standard and Poor's, and Fitch Ratings for fifty developing countries from 1987 to 2003. We find that regime type and most other political factors have little effect on bond raters. Instead, trade, inflation, growth, and bond default strongly affect sovereign ratings. The message for policymakers in developing countries is that factors that support bond repayment are most useful for enhancing CRA ratings.The authors' names are listed alphabetically to indicate equal contribution. For comments on previous versions of this article, we are grateful to Matthias Kaelberer, Sebastian Saiegh, Tim Sinclair, Mike Tomz, Paul Vaaler, Jeff Wooldridge, as well as panelists and participants of the ISA 2006. We thank Nate Jensen, Layna Mosley, and Andy Sobel for helping us make contacts with bond raters. We also thank Tai Scelfo for her research assistance. We greatly acknowledge the generosity of the bond raters for giving us insights on the ratings process. Portions of this research were supported by a 2005 Small Grant by the American Political Science Association.

In this article I examine how a weak international law can be created despite the presence of a strong norm, and I use weak law to probe the relationship between social and legal norms. International law dealing with mercenaries is notoriously flawed. These flaws have been attributed to the idea that state interest (or lack of interest) led to the development of intentionally weak law. In fact, ineffective anti-mercenary law is the result of the influence of norms. A strong norm against mercenary use has led states to devise a definition that indicated what they found problematic about mercenaries, and differentiated mercenaries from other actors. This definition followed the anti-mercenary norm but created a number of loopholes, which were made worse by the fact that commitment to the norm was so strong that states were unable to make adjustments necessary to create more effective law. The development of the law against mercenaries was further undermined by the pressures of a competing norm. During the 1980s, creation of a UN Convention to deal with mercenaries was stymied by the fact that many states were seeking to protect the norm of state responsibility, and the conflict between this norm and the anti-mercenary norm delayed the Convention to such a degree it was superseded by events. Weak anti-mercenary law, created in the presence of a strong anti-mercenary norm, can demonstrate four things about the relationship between social and legal norms: that states advocate the creation of law because of what it is rather than what it does; that legal institutionalization is not necessarily good for the further development of a norm; that strong commitment to a norm can lead to the creation of weak law; and that social and legal norms might not differ because the latter is more effective.The author would like to thank Audrey Kurth Cronin, Guy Goodwin-Gill, Henry Shue, Adam Roberts, Henry Shue, Christine Whelan, Dominik Zaum, and the two anonymous referees, for their comments. Helpful comments were made by Joanna Harrington and Neil MacFarlane on an earlier version of this piece.

Recent studies of individual attitudes toward immigration emphasize concerns about labor-market competition as a potent source of anti-immigrant sentiment, in particular among less-educated or less-skilled citizens who fear being forced to compete for jobs with low-skilled immigrants willing to work for much lower wages. We examine new data on attitudes toward immigration available from the 2003 European Social Survey. In contrast to predictions based on conventional arguments about labor-market competition, which anticipate that individuals will oppose immigration of workers with similar skills to their own but support immigration of workers with different skill levels, we find that people with higher levels of education and occupational skills are more likely to favor immigration regardless of the skill attributes of the immigrants in question. Across Europe, higher education and higher skills mean more support for all types of immigrants. These relationships are almost identical among individuals in the labor force (that is, those competing for jobs) and those not in the labor force. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, then, the connection between the education or skill levels of individuals and views about immigration appears to have very little, if anything, to do with fears about labor-market competition. This finding is consistent with extensive economic research showing that the income and employment effects of immigration in European economies are actually very small. We find that a large component of the link between education and attitudes toward immigrants is driven by differences among individuals in cultural values and beliefs. More educated respondents are significantly less racist and place greater value on cultural diversity than do their counterparts; they are also more likely to believe that immigration generates benefits for the host economy as a whole.The authors would like to thank Beth Simmons, Shigeo Herano, Mike Tomz, James Alt, Jeffry Frieden, Ron Rogowski, Ken Scheve, Torben Iversen, Andy Baker, and Peter Gourevitch for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

One of the most important developments in the world economy during the past three decades has been the willingness of governments in emerging markets to liberalize controls over international capital movements—a process known as capital account liberalization. What accounts for this trend? While existing research highlights a number of important factors, it neglects the role played by the rise and spread of neoliberal ideas that prioritized liberalization as a policy choice. Extending the literature on epistemic communities, I argue one critical mechanism shaping policy decisions is the formation of a coherent team of neoliberal economists. Using a new data set that codes the professional training of more than 1500 policymakers in emerging markets, I assess the relative importance of this argument quantitatively on a sample of twenty-nine emerging markets from 1977 to 1999. In order to assess the independent effect of neoliberal economists, I also take into account the endogeneity of the appointment process, assessing whether appointments are driven by credibility concerns, political interests, or economic conditions. I also stress that a fuller understanding of the appointment process necessitates a focus on the social environment in which appointments are situated.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security (PIPES), University of Chicago, 28 April 2005; the 99th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 28–31 August 2003; and the Meeting of the Working Group on Political Economy, European University Institute (EUI), San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy, 29 October 2003. The author is grateful for helpful comments on earlier drafts provided by David Andrews, Benjamin J. Cohen, Scott Cooper, Garrett Glasgow, Lloyd Gruber, Emilie Hafner-Burton, Bob Hancke, Joseph Jupille, Ralf Leiteritz, Charles Lipson, Layna Mosley, Lou Pauly, Andy Sobel, Duncan Snidal, Lora Viola, and participants in the PIPES workshop. The author would also like to thank Lisa Martin and the anonymous reviewers for their many suggestions and insightful comments on previous versions of this manuscript. Research support provided by the Department of Political Science at Syracuse University and a Jean Monnet Fellowship from the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the EUI is also gratefully acknowledged.

There are errors in the data used in the analysis of Hicks and Zorn's “Economic Globalization, the Macro Economy, and Reversals of Welfare Expansion in Affluent Democracies, 1978–94,” which appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of International Organization (Vol. 59, 631–62). New, corrected data are now included in the data appendix for the article available at 〈http://www.sociology.emory.edu/ahicks/IO.html〉 Accompanying the data appendix is a second appendix of text and tables that includes an errata report, new analyses, and revised findings. New analyses do not indicate that pressures from unemployment, societal aging, and globalization stressed in Hicks and Zorn (2005) drive retrenchment. Rather they indicate that strong aggregate economic performance—affluence, economic growth, and low de-industrialization in particular—and institutional centralization of political power inhibit retrenchment, while the reverse fosters it. This at least is the case for the two least restrictive of Hicks and Zorn's three measures of retrenchment. For outcome measures that do not identify a retrenchment unless there is, at least, a 6 percent cut in social spending (a threshold condition of C = −0.06 for the identification of a “retrenchment” on the underlying spending variable PCRS), Hicks and Zorn's hypothesized determinants do not have statistically significant effects. This indicates that their model lacks explanatory power for deep cuts in social spending.