Europeans evaluate the European Community (EC) according to its economic performance, political salience, and role in international relations. During the last two decades their measured attitudes toward European integration warmed especially when inflation rates fell, as the EC share of the country's trade expanded, when EC elections and referenda increased attention to the community, and to some extend during periods when East-West relations were relaxed. Europeans did not vary their support according to their countries' shares of the Brussels budget. Thus, notwithstanding Denmark's 1992 rejection of the Maastricht treaty and the end of the cold war, recent EC reforms that increase monetary stability, intra-European trade and political attention are all likely to maintain or increase citizen support for the EC. These findings result from a model that blends comparative political economy with international relations in one of the first applications of pooled cross-sectional and time-series analysis to the comparative study of public opinion.

Ronald Rogowski's work offers valuable insight into the impact of changing trade exposure on domestic politics. Exploring the political implications of the well-known factor endowments model of international trade theory, Rogowski argues that owners of relatively abundant productive factors will form a free-trading coalition against owners of relatively scarce productive factors, who will align in favor of protection. Rogowski's parsimonious three-factor version of the factor endowments theory—although offering valuable insight into the politics of less developed economies, including today's developed economies in earlier centuries—produces significant anomalies when applied to advanced economies. Intuitive logic and empirical research, especially the Leontief paradox, suggest that the highly complex division of labor found in developed countries will confound the simplicity of the three-factor model. Edward Learner's multifactor model suggests solutions to the anomalies that afflict Rogowski's simpler model when applied to recent politics in the United States and Europe.

Most explanations for the creation of new state institutions locate the cause of change in the conditions or characteristics of the states themselves. Some aspect of a state's economic, social, political, or military situation is said to create a functional need for the new bureaucracy which then is taken up by one or more domestic groups who succeed in changing the state apparatus. However, changes in state structure may be prompted not only by changing conditions of individual states but also by socialization and conformance with international norms. In the case of one organizational innovation recently adopted by states across the international system, namely, science policy bureaucracies, indicators of state conditions and functional need for these entities are not correlated with the pattern for their adoption. Instead, adoption was prompted by the activities of an international organization which “taught” states the value of science policy organizations and established the coordination of science as an appropriate, and even a necessary, role for states. This finding lends support to constructivist or reflective theories that treat states as social entities shaped by international social action, as opposed to more conventional treatments of states as autonomous international agents.

The currently popular concept of two-level games suffers from certain shortcomings as an approach to studying the interaction between domestic- and international-level variables. In the two-level game approach, different types of domestic-international interaction are insufficiently distinguished, and special dynamics of cases involving third parties like military allies are not adequately recognized. This article modifies the two-level game concept by specifying three forms of domestic-international interaction and adding a third level to the framework. The utility of this new “three-and-three” approach is illustrated through analysis of the U.S.-Soviet negotiations on intermediaterange nuclear forces in the 1980s. This analysis generates new hypotheses suggesting that domestic actors can shape the agenda for international negotiations and that certain forms of domestic-international interaction tend to bring about large changes in the positions of the principal parties to a negotiation.

Several member states of the European Free Trade Association have applied for admission into the European Community (EC). Paradoxically, enlarging the EC in this way will expand the voting power of Luxembourg, the smallest EC member state, in the EC Council of Ministers but diminish the power of the other states. In an EC with more members, voting by unanimity increasingly becomes an impractical decision-making procedure. As the Single European Act and possibly also the Treaty on European Union are being implemented, the distribution of EC council voting power takes on growing importance, since the range of issues to be decided by qualified majority votes increases considerably. Moreover, there are tendencies within the EC to render decision making more transparent and to publish member states' positions taken in majority votes. Thus, the distribution of voting power will increasingly be a crucial aspect for the EC.