B Peter Rosendorff
Biographic Data
| ID | 1022758 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Peter Rosendorff |
| GIVEN NAMES | B Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Rosendorff |
| SIGNATURE | ROSENDORFF B P |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6775-8911 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1540 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
The Future of Global Governance and World Order
This special issue of International Organization is composed of fifteen short essays that consider how longer-term trends (including the rise of China, the anti-globalization backlash, the rise of populism, the emergence of new technologies, the slowing or reversal of democratization in many countries, and the existential threat of climate change), along with recent developments in US foreign policy, are likely to affect the future of global gove…
Do the Bretton Woods Institutions promote economic transparency
Disseminating data is a core mission of international organizations. The Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs), in particular, have become a main data source for research and policy-making. Due to their extensive lending activities, the BWIs often find themselves in a position to assist and pressure governments to increase the amount of economic data that they provide. In this study, we explore the association between loans from the BWIs and an index…
Antiglobalization sentiment: Exposure and immobility
Individuals with heightened labor market insecurity express more protectionist, xenophobic, and isolationist sentiment. We construct a novel measure of labor market insecurity that combines an individual's industry‐based exposure to import competition with an occupation‐based measure of job immobility. Immobility captures the similarity of an individual's job to others in the economy, weighted by their prevalence. The holder of a job that is diss…
The Unfolding Sovereign Debt Crisis
Following the 2008 global financial crisis, years of low interest rates provided a rare opportunity for many developing nations to borrow in international markets—whether issuing bonds in their own currencies, securing loans from private-sector banks and commodity traders, or borrowing from China, which emerged as a dominant official creditor. Developing countries’ overall external debt rose to a record level during this period. As central banks …
Government Choices of Debt Instruments
Governments borrow from a range of creditors—commercial banks, sovereign bondholders, official bilateral creditors, and multilateral financial institutions. Sovereigns’ creditor portfolios vary significantly across space and time. While creditor portfolios partly reflect supply-side considerations (macroeconomic profiles and associated default risk), they also reflect governments’ preferences over fiscal transparency. Governments that prefer to d…
Bilateral or Multilateral? International Financial Flows and the Dirty-Work Hypothesis
How do governments choose between bilateral and multilateral foreign policy? We argue that powerful governments can exploit their influence over multilateral organizations to hide domestically contentious foreign policies. Applying this argument to international financial flows, we formulate hypotheses on the choice between bilateral and multilateral financing for political purposes. We test them by examining how the United States incentivizes su…
A Model of the Two-Level Game
Appendix
Decompensating domestically: The Political Economy of Anti-Globalism
The rise of populism across advanced industrial countries presents a challenge to the institutions and norms that make up the current global order and threatens to undo the global system that has enabled decades of free trade and investment. We outline in this paper a domestic political economy account of the contemporary crisis of the global order, rooted in disenchantment with the redistributive bargain between globalization's winners and loser…
Why Do Autocrats Disclose? Economic Transparency and Inter-elite Politics in the Shadow of Mass Unrest
Autocratic governments hold a preference for opacity. Autocracies are less transparent than democracies and a closed informational environment preserves autocratic regimes from mass unrest. Yet, autocracies vary widely in the extent to which they disclose economic information. In this article, we offer an explanation for why some autocrats choose to disclose. We contend that, paradoxically, some autocratic leaders may benefit from increasing the …
The Millennium Development Goals and Education: Accountability and Substitution in Global Assessment
Precise international metrics and assessments may induce governments to alter policies in pursuit of more favorable assessments according to these metrics. In this paper, we explore a secondary effect of global performance indicators (GPIs). Insofar as governments have finite resources and make trade-offs in public goods investments, a GPI that precisely targets the provision of a particular public good may cause governments to substitute away fr…
Transparency, Protest and Democratic Stability
Democratic rule is maintained so long as all relevant actors in the political system comply with the institutional rules of the game – democratic institutions must be self-enforcing. We examine the role of transparency in supporting a democratic equilibrium. Transparency improves the functioning of elections: in transparent polities, elections more effectively resolve adverse selection problems between the public and their rulers. Transparency in…
Information, Democracy, and Autocracy: Economic Transparency and Political (In)Stability
Advocates for economic development often call for greater transparency. But what does transparency really mean? What are its consequences? This breakthrough book demonstrates how information impacts major political phenomena, including mass protest, the survival of dictatorships, democratic stability, as well as economic performance. The book introduces a new measure of a specific facet of transparency: the dissemination of economic data. Analysi…
Cooperative Autocracies: Leader Survival, Creditworthiness, and Bilateral Investment Treaties
Capital accumulation is essential for economic development, but investors face risk when putting their capital to productive use. Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) commit leaders to limiting their takings of foreign assets and the revenues they generate. We offer theory and evidence that BITs enhance leader survival more in autocracies than democracies. BITs improve the “investment climate” in signatory states, and they do so by more in autocr…
Domestic Politics of Trade Policy
Domestic politics shape international trade policy, but exactly how and why remains an open question. We explore the cutting‐edge literature that focuses on how agents' interests are formed, whose interests are organized, and how those interests interact with each other via domestic political institutions to generate both trade policy and international cooperation over trade more broadly. In turn, trade policies operate as a feedback loop. Intern…
Transparency, Protest, and Autocratic Instability
The collapse of autocratic regimes is often brought about through large-scale mobilization and collective action by elements of the populace. The willingness of any given member of the public to participate in actions such as strikes and protests is contingent upon her beliefs about others' willingness to similarly mobilize. In this article, we examine the effect of a specific form of transparency-the disclosure of economic data by the government…
Measuring Transparency
Transparency is often viewed as crucial to government accountability, but its measurement remains elusive. This concept encompasses many dimensions, which have distinct effects. In this article, we focus on a specific dimension of transparency: governments' collection and dissemination of aggregate data. We construct a measure of this aspect of transparency, using an item response model that treats transparency as a latent predictor of the report…
Leadership Survival, Regime Type, Policy Uncertainty and PTA Accession1: Leadership Survival
Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) limit member-states' trade policy discretion; consequently, policy uncertainty is mitigated. Reductions in policy uncertainty stemming from accession to a PTA improve the resource allocation decisions of the voters and reduce deadweight losses from the need to self-insure against policy uncertainty. The resultant increase in efficiency improves an incumbent government's—particularly a democratic government's—c…
Why Do Authoritarian Regimes Sign the Convention Against Torture
Traditional international relations theory holds that states will join only those international institutions with which they generally intend to comply. Here we show when this claim might not hold. We construct a model of an authoritarian government’s decision to sign the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT). Authoritarian governments use the signing of this treaty — followed by the willful violation of its provisions — as a costly signal to domes…
Democracy and Transparency
Are democracies more transparent than other types of political regimes? Many people believe that the presence of elections alone is not sufficient for a country to be considered democratic and that transparency must be included as part of the definition of political regime. We agree that contestability of elections and transparency of policymaking are analytically distinct concepts. Adopting minimalist approaches to democracy and transparency, we…
Strengthening International Courts and the Early Settlement of Disputes
How does variation in the strength of a court’s jurisdiction and enforcement affect strategic behavior by states involved in international disputes? The authors construct a formal model and identify three important ways that legal institutions can have a deleterious effect on international cooperation by magnifying the bargaining problems arising from incomplete information about the quality of the legal claims. First, strong courts create less i…
The Political Economy of Transnational Terrorism
Clearly, the events of September 11, 2001 (henceforth 9/11), heightened the public's awareness of the threat posed by modern-day terrorism. For global society, 9/11 was a defining moment for a number of reasons. First, the sheer magnitude of the attack and the resulting carnage of almost 3,000 killed were unprecedented in terms of terrorist attacks. Second, the associated financial losses and repercussions of $80 to $90 billion was far greater th…
Stability and Rigidity: Politics and Design of the WTO's Dispute Settlement Procedure
The increased "legalization" embodied in the revised Dispute Settlement Procedure (DSP) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is shown to be an institutional innovation that increases the opportunities for states to temporarily suspend their obligations in periods of unexpected, but heightened, domestic political pressure for protection. This increased flexibility in the system reduces per-period cooperation among states but also reduces the poss…
Locating the Proper Authorities: The Interaction of Domestic and International Institutions
Locating the Proper Authorities: The Interaction of Domestic and International Institutions
Too Much of a Good Thing: The Proactive Response Dilemma
In a two-player proactive response game the level of proactive activity and the choice of terrorist target is endogenized. The targeted government first chooses its measures to weaken the terrorists, and the terrorists then choose the type of event—normal or spectacular. Unlike previous analyses, proactive policy has a downside by increasing grievances and, consequently, terrorist recruitment. If the government responds too harshly, its actions c…
Why Democracies Cooperate More: Electoral Control and International Trade Agreements
Over the past fifty years, barriers to international trade have decreased substantially. A key source of this decline in protectionism has been the proliferation of agreements among countries to liberalize commerce. In this article, we analyze the domestic political conditions under which states have concluded such agreements and, more generally, explore the factors affecting interstate economic cooperation. We argue that interstate cooperation o…
Free to Trade: Democracies, Autocracies, and International Trade
Relatively little research has focused on whether countries' political institutions affect their international trade relations. We address this issue by analyzing the relationship between regime type and trade policy. In a formal model of commercial policy, we establish that the ratification responsibility of the legislature in democratic states leads pairs of democracies to set trade barriers at a lower level than mixed country-pairs (composed o…
The Optimal Design of International Trade Institutions: Uncertainty and Escape
International institutions that include an escape clause generate more durable and stable cooperative international regimes and are easier to achieve ex ante. The escape clause is endogenous in a model of repeated trade-barrier setting in the presence of symmetric, two-sided, political uncertainty. They permit, along the equilibrium path, countries to temporarily deviate from their obligations in periods of excessive, unexpected political pressur…
Democracy and Transparency
Are democracies more transparent than other types of political regimes? Many people believe that the presence of elections alone is not sufficient for a country to be considered democratic and that transparency must be included as part of the definition of political regime. We agree that contestability of elections and transparency of policymaking are analytically distinct concepts. Adopting minimalist approaches to democracy and transparency, we…
Democratic Politics and International Trade Negotiations: Elections and Divided Government As Constraints on Trade Liberalization
Elections affect both the probability of successful ratification and the terms of international trade agreements; domestic politics in its simplest form shapes international negotiations. Without elections, the extent of protection in a trade agreement increases with the degree of divided government, and the Schelling conjecture—whereby an international negotiator can point to a hawkish legislature to extract greater concessions from the foreign …
Transparency, Protest, and Autocratic Instability
The collapse of autocratic regimes is often brought about through large-scale mobilization and collective action by elements of the populace. The willingness of any given member of the public to participate in actions such as strikes and protests is contingent upon her beliefs about others' willingness to similarly mobilize. In this article, we examine the effect of a specific form of transparency-the disclosure of economic data by the government…
Too Much of a Good Thing: The Proactive Response Dilemma
In a two-player proactive response game the level of proactive activity and the choice of terrorist target is endogenized. The targeted government first chooses its measures to weaken the terrorists, and the terrorists then choose the type of event—normal or spectacular. Unlike previous analyses, proactive policy has a downside by increasing grievances and, consequently, terrorist recruitment. If the government responds too harshly, its actions c…
Measuring Transparency
Transparency is often viewed as crucial to government accountability, but its measurement remains elusive. This concept encompasses many dimensions, which have distinct effects. In this article, we focus on a specific dimension of transparency: governments' collection and dissemination of aggregate data. We construct a measure of this aspect of transparency, using an item response model that treats transparency as a latent predictor of the report…
Stability and Rigidity: Politics and Design of the WTO's Dispute Settlement Procedure
The increased "legalization" embodied in the revised Dispute Settlement Procedure (DSP) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is shown to be an institutional innovation that increases the opportunities for states to temporarily suspend their obligations in periods of unexpected, but heightened, domestic political pressure for protection. This increased flexibility in the system reduces per-period cooperation among states but also reduces the poss…
Why Do Authoritarian Regimes Sign the Convention Against Torture
Traditional international relations theory holds that states will join only those international institutions with which they generally intend to comply. Here we show when this claim might not hold. We construct a model of an authoritarian government’s decision to sign the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT). Authoritarian governments use the signing of this treaty — followed by the willful violation of its provisions — as a costly signal to domes…
Bilateral or Multilateral? International Financial Flows and the Dirty-Work Hypothesis
How do governments choose between bilateral and multilateral foreign policy? We argue that powerful governments can exploit their influence over multilateral organizations to hide domestically contentious foreign policies. Applying this argument to international financial flows, we formulate hypotheses on the choice between bilateral and multilateral financing for political purposes. We test them by examining how the United States incentivizes su…
Strengthening International Courts and the Early Settlement of Disputes
How does variation in the strength of a court’s jurisdiction and enforcement affect strategic behavior by states involved in international disputes? The authors construct a formal model and identify three important ways that legal institutions can have a deleterious effect on international cooperation by magnifying the bargaining problems arising from incomplete information about the quality of the legal claims. First, strong courts create less i…
Decompensating domestically: The Political Economy of Anti-Globalism
The rise of populism across advanced industrial countries presents a challenge to the institutions and norms that make up the current global order and threatens to undo the global system that has enabled decades of free trade and investment. We outline in this paper a domestic political economy account of the contemporary crisis of the global order, rooted in disenchantment with the redistributive bargain between globalization's winners and loser…
Cooperative Autocracies: Leader Survival, Creditworthiness, and Bilateral Investment Treaties
Capital accumulation is essential for economic development, but investors face risk when putting their capital to productive use. Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) commit leaders to limiting their takings of foreign assets and the revenues they generate. We offer theory and evidence that BITs enhance leader survival more in autocracies than democracies. BITs improve the “investment climate” in signatory states, and they do so by more in autocr…
Leadership Survival, Regime Type, Policy Uncertainty and PTA Accession1: Leadership Survival
Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) limit member-states' trade policy discretion; consequently, policy uncertainty is mitigated. Reductions in policy uncertainty stemming from accession to a PTA improve the resource allocation decisions of the voters and reduce deadweight losses from the need to self-insure against policy uncertainty. The resultant increase in efficiency improves an incumbent government's—particularly a democratic government's—c…
Why Do Autocrats Disclose? Economic Transparency and Inter-elite Politics in the Shadow of Mass Unrest
Autocratic governments hold a preference for opacity. Autocracies are less transparent than democracies and a closed informational environment preserves autocratic regimes from mass unrest. Yet, autocracies vary widely in the extent to which they disclose economic information. In this article, we offer an explanation for why some autocrats choose to disclose. We contend that, paradoxically, some autocratic leaders may benefit from increasing the …
The Political Economy of Transnational Terrorism
Clearly, the events of September 11, 2001 (henceforth 9/11), heightened the public's awareness of the threat posed by modern-day terrorism. For global society, 9/11 was a defining moment for a number of reasons. First, the sheer magnitude of the attack and the resulting carnage of almost 3,000 killed were unprecedented in terms of terrorist attacks. Second, the associated financial losses and repercussions of $80 to $90 billion was far greater th…
Transparency, Protest and Democratic Stability
Democratic rule is maintained so long as all relevant actors in the political system comply with the institutional rules of the game – democratic institutions must be self-enforcing. We examine the role of transparency in supporting a democratic equilibrium. Transparency improves the functioning of elections: in transparent polities, elections more effectively resolve adverse selection problems between the public and their rulers. Transparency in…
Locating the Proper Authorities: The Interaction of Domestic and International Institutions
Locating the Proper Authorities: The Interaction of Domestic and International Institutions
Government Choices of Debt Instruments
Governments borrow from a range of creditors—commercial banks, sovereign bondholders, official bilateral creditors, and multilateral financial institutions. Sovereigns’ creditor portfolios vary significantly across space and time. While creditor portfolios partly reflect supply-side considerations (macroeconomic profiles and associated default risk), they also reflect governments’ preferences over fiscal transparency. Governments that prefer to d…
The Millennium Development Goals and Education: Accountability and Substitution in Global Assessment
Precise international metrics and assessments may induce governments to alter policies in pursuit of more favorable assessments according to these metrics. In this paper, we explore a secondary effect of global performance indicators (GPIs). Insofar as governments have finite resources and make trade-offs in public goods investments, a GPI that precisely targets the provision of a particular public good may cause governments to substitute away fr…
Replication, Realism, and Robustness: Analyzing Political Regimes and International Trade
Our earlier article established that pairs of democracies trade more freely than country-pairs composed of a democracy and an autocracy (Mansfield, Milner, and Rosendorff 2000). Xinyuan Dai (2002) incorrectly asserts that our conclusion depends on the preferences of the decision makers who formulate trade policy. We show that Dai fails to accurately replicate our model, and hence erroneously claims that the new equilibria she deduces are consiste…
Antiglobalization sentiment: Exposure and immobility
Individuals with heightened labor market insecurity express more protectionist, xenophobic, and isolationist sentiment. We construct a novel measure of labor market insecurity that combines an individual's industry‐based exposure to import competition with an occupation‐based measure of job immobility. Immobility captures the similarity of an individual's job to others in the economy, weighted by their prevalence. The holder of a job that is diss…
The Future of Global Governance and World Order
This special issue of International Organization is composed of fifteen short essays that consider how longer-term trends (including the rise of China, the anti-globalization backlash, the rise of populism, the emergence of new technologies, the slowing or reversal of democratization in many countries, and the existential threat of climate change), along with recent developments in US foreign policy, are likely to affect the future of global gove…
Democratic Politics and International Trade Negotiations: Elections and Divided Government As Constraints on Trade Liberalization
Elections affect both the probability of successful ratification and the terms of international trade agreements; domestic politics in its simplest form shapes international negotiations. Without elections, the extent of protection in a trade agreement increases with the degree of divided government, and the Schelling conjecture—whereby an international negotiator can point to a hawkish legislature to extract greater concessions from the foreign …
Free to Trade: Democracies, Autocracies, and International Trade
Relatively little research has focused on whether countries' political institutions affect their international trade relations. We address this issue by analyzing the relationship between regime type and trade policy. In a formal model of commercial policy, we establish that the ratification responsibility of the legislature in democratic states leads pairs of democracies to set trade barriers at a lower level than mixed country-pairs (composed o…
The Optimal Design of International Trade Institutions: Uncertainty and Escape
International institutions that include an escape clause generate more durable and stable cooperative international regimes and are easier to achieve ex ante. The escape clause is endogenous in a model of repeated trade-barrier setting in the presence of symmetric, two-sided, political uncertainty. They permit, along the equilibrium path, countries to temporarily deviate from their obligations in periods of excessive, unexpected political pressur…
Why Democracies Cooperate More: Electoral Control and International Trade Agreements
Over the past fifty years, barriers to international trade have decreased substantially. A key source of this decline in protectionism has been the proliferation of agreements among countries to liberalize commerce. In this article, we analyze the domestic political conditions under which states have concluded such agreements and, more generally, explore the factors affecting interstate economic cooperation. We argue that interstate cooperation o…
Replication, Realism, and Robustness: Analyzing Political Regimes and International Trade
Our earlier article established that pairs of democracies trade more freely than country-pairs composed of a democracy and an autocracy (Mansfield, Milner, and Rosendorff 2000). Xinyuan Dai (2002) incorrectly asserts that our conclusion depends on the preferences of the decision makers who formulate trade policy. We show that Dai fails to accurately replicate our model, and hence erroneously claims that the new equilibria she deduces are consiste…
Locating the Proper Authorities: The Interaction of Domestic and International Institutions
Locating the Proper Authorities: The Interaction of Domestic and International Institutions
Too Much of a Good Thing: The Proactive Response Dilemma
In a two-player proactive response game the level of proactive activity and the choice of terrorist target is endogenized. The targeted government first chooses its measures to weaken the terrorists, and the terrorists then choose the type of event—normal or spectacular. Unlike previous analyses, proactive policy has a downside by increasing grievances and, consequently, terrorist recruitment. If the government responds too harshly, its actions c…
The Political Economy of Transnational Terrorism
Clearly, the events of September 11, 2001 (henceforth 9/11), heightened the public's awareness of the threat posed by modern-day terrorism. For global society, 9/11 was a defining moment for a number of reasons. First, the sheer magnitude of the attack and the resulting carnage of almost 3,000 killed were unprecedented in terms of terrorist attacks. Second, the associated financial losses and repercussions of $80 to $90 billion was far greater th…
Stability and Rigidity: Politics and Design of the WTO's Dispute Settlement Procedure
The increased "legalization" embodied in the revised Dispute Settlement Procedure (DSP) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is shown to be an institutional innovation that increases the opportunities for states to temporarily suspend their obligations in periods of unexpected, but heightened, domestic political pressure for protection. This increased flexibility in the system reduces per-period cooperation among states but also reduces the poss…
Strengthening International Courts and the Early Settlement of Disputes
How does variation in the strength of a court’s jurisdiction and enforcement affect strategic behavior by states involved in international disputes? The authors construct a formal model and identify three important ways that legal institutions can have a deleterious effect on international cooperation by magnifying the bargaining problems arising from incomplete information about the quality of the legal claims. First, strong courts create less i…
Why Do Authoritarian Regimes Sign the Convention Against Torture
Traditional international relations theory holds that states will join only those international institutions with which they generally intend to comply. Here we show when this claim might not hold. We construct a model of an authoritarian government’s decision to sign the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT). Authoritarian governments use the signing of this treaty — followed by the willful violation of its provisions — as a costly signal to domes…
Democracy and Transparency
Are democracies more transparent than other types of political regimes? Many people believe that the presence of elections alone is not sufficient for a country to be considered democratic and that transparency must be included as part of the definition of political regime. We agree that contestability of elections and transparency of policymaking are analytically distinct concepts. Adopting minimalist approaches to democracy and transparency, we…
Leadership Survival, Regime Type, Policy Uncertainty and PTA Accession1: Leadership Survival
Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) limit member-states' trade policy discretion; consequently, policy uncertainty is mitigated. Reductions in policy uncertainty stemming from accession to a PTA improve the resource allocation decisions of the voters and reduce deadweight losses from the need to self-insure against policy uncertainty. The resultant increase in efficiency improves an incumbent government's—particularly a democratic government's—c…
Measuring Transparency
Transparency is often viewed as crucial to government accountability, but its measurement remains elusive. This concept encompasses many dimensions, which have distinct effects. In this article, we focus on a specific dimension of transparency: governments' collection and dissemination of aggregate data. We construct a measure of this aspect of transparency, using an item response model that treats transparency as a latent predictor of the report…
Domestic Politics of Trade Policy
Domestic politics shape international trade policy, but exactly how and why remains an open question. We explore the cutting‐edge literature that focuses on how agents' interests are formed, whose interests are organized, and how those interests interact with each other via domestic political institutions to generate both trade policy and international cooperation over trade more broadly. In turn, trade policies operate as a feedback loop. Intern…
Transparency, Protest, and Autocratic Instability
The collapse of autocratic regimes is often brought about through large-scale mobilization and collective action by elements of the populace. The willingness of any given member of the public to participate in actions such as strikes and protests is contingent upon her beliefs about others' willingness to similarly mobilize. In this article, we examine the effect of a specific form of transparency-the disclosure of economic data by the government…
Information, Democracy, and Autocracy: Economic Transparency and Political (In)Stability
Advocates for economic development often call for greater transparency. But what does transparency really mean? What are its consequences? This breakthrough book demonstrates how information impacts major political phenomena, including mass protest, the survival of dictatorships, democratic stability, as well as economic performance. The book introduces a new measure of a specific facet of transparency: the dissemination of economic data. Analysi…
Cooperative Autocracies: Leader Survival, Creditworthiness, and Bilateral Investment Treaties
Capital accumulation is essential for economic development, but investors face risk when putting their capital to productive use. Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) commit leaders to limiting their takings of foreign assets and the revenues they generate. We offer theory and evidence that BITs enhance leader survival more in autocracies than democracies. BITs improve the “investment climate” in signatory states, and they do so by more in autocr…
Why Do Autocrats Disclose? Economic Transparency and Inter-elite Politics in the Shadow of Mass Unrest
Autocratic governments hold a preference for opacity. Autocracies are less transparent than democracies and a closed informational environment preserves autocratic regimes from mass unrest. Yet, autocracies vary widely in the extent to which they disclose economic information. In this article, we offer an explanation for why some autocrats choose to disclose. We contend that, paradoxically, some autocratic leaders may benefit from increasing the …
The Millennium Development Goals and Education: Accountability and Substitution in Global Assessment
Precise international metrics and assessments may induce governments to alter policies in pursuit of more favorable assessments according to these metrics. In this paper, we explore a secondary effect of global performance indicators (GPIs). Insofar as governments have finite resources and make trade-offs in public goods investments, a GPI that precisely targets the provision of a particular public good may cause governments to substitute away fr…
Transparency, Protest and Democratic Stability
Democratic rule is maintained so long as all relevant actors in the political system comply with the institutional rules of the game – democratic institutions must be self-enforcing. We examine the role of transparency in supporting a democratic equilibrium. Transparency improves the functioning of elections: in transparent polities, elections more effectively resolve adverse selection problems between the public and their rulers. Transparency in…
A Model of the Two-Level Game
Appendix
Decompensating domestically: The Political Economy of Anti-Globalism
The rise of populism across advanced industrial countries presents a challenge to the institutions and norms that make up the current global order and threatens to undo the global system that has enabled decades of free trade and investment. We outline in this paper a domestic political economy account of the contemporary crisis of the global order, rooted in disenchantment with the redistributive bargain between globalization's winners and loser…
Bilateral or Multilateral? International Financial Flows and the Dirty-Work Hypothesis
How do governments choose between bilateral and multilateral foreign policy? We argue that powerful governments can exploit their influence over multilateral organizations to hide domestically contentious foreign policies. Applying this argument to international financial flows, we formulate hypotheses on the choice between bilateral and multilateral financing for political purposes. We test them by examining how the United States incentivizes su…
Political science (27 works) · Economics (24 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Democracy (13 works) · Political economy (12 works) · International Development and Aid (11 works) · International economics (11 works) · Business (10 works)