Firms lobby for subsidies along geographic, sector, or factor lines and, as a result, receive subsidies with a local, sectoral, or factorwide scope. This article investigates what determines the line of cleavage and thereby the scope of the subsidy. The factor mobility hypothesis, according to which an economic prior—the degree of factor mobility—determines the geometry of lobbying coalitions, misses the fact that factor mobility is as much the product of policy and policymaking as it is its determinant. This article argues instead that politicians maximize their chances of staying in power through the deliberate use of subsidies to structure the political debate and embed factor owners into stable policy networks. Individual factor owners, in turn, join these policy networks to lobby for monopoly rents capable of insuring them against adverse economic competition. The model yields two testable hypotheses. First, right governments favor subsidies to capital, whereas left governments favor subsidies to labor. Second, the degree of intensity of electoral competition determines the scope of the subsidy policy. Quantitative and qualitative evidence is offered for 21 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries during the 1980s.

I use the nuclear proliferation regime to show that dyadic diplomacy is not necessarily incompatible with the building of a multilateral regime; bilateralism is not the opposite of multilateralism, but an efficient component thereof. Although this point will not be new to most students of institutions, no general rationale has so far been offered on the complementarity of bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. Starting from a characterization of proliferation as the result of a large number of prisoner's dilemmas played out between states engaged in local dyadic rivalries, I demonstrate that it is possible for the superpowers to design an optimal mix of threats and bribes in which states with low compliance costs join the regime on the terms of the multilateral treaty alone; states with intermediate compliance costs need additional customized incentives, delivered through bilateral agreements; and states with high compliance costs are not only left out of the regime but also punished for nonparticipation. I draw a few comparative statics that I systematically test on Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) membership data. I discuss the applicability of the model to the currency, trade, and aid regimes.

Different international regimes are built from legal instruments that vary in terms of whether they are multilateral, bilateral, or a combination thereof. We investigate the reasons for such variation. The choice between multilateralism and bilateralism is a function of the tradeoff between each instrument's relative flaw. Multilateralism is wasteful in incentives, as the same agreement is offered to all states regardless of their compliance costs. Bilateralism mitigates this problem by allowing for more tailored agreements but in the process multiplies transaction costs by requiring many of them. We use a formal model to generate propositions on the design of "lateralism" and the related issue of membership size and offer illustrations in the context of four regimes: foreign direct investment, human rights, climate change, and international trade.International Studies Quarterly (2014) 58, 15-28

Even if a democracy were more likely to pursue free trade than an autocracy (an unproven generalization), the simultaneous spread of democracy in the world would not necessarily yield a reduction in protection, but might in fact cause an increase. The reason for this paradoxical outcome is the fact that democratic convergence creates power profiles identical across nations. Similar regimes tend to empower the same classes of producers, with the result that if trade is based on relative comparative advantages, and countries specialize on the basis of factor endowments, democratic convergence (or any type of regime convergence for that matter) empowers as many free traders as protectionists, with negative consequences for trade; only if trade is fueled by scale economies, and countries specialize along product lines, then may political convergence not hurt trade. Empirically, I show that this model helps explain the timing of nineteenth-century European trade liberalization better than existing explanations; it also helps us understand the easiness with which liberalization proceeded in the postwar era; and it casts a new light on the difficulties presently encountered, with democracy spreading at a time when product specialization is on the retreat. Suppose three hypothetical worlds: a first one, in which regimes are converging around the democratic ideal; another in which convergence is around autocracy; and a third one in which regimes are becoming less alike. In which world, ceteris paribus, are governments most likely to liberalize their trade policy?A common answer is the first; the all-out democratic world is the most likely of the three to be open. The rationale goes back to Kant, Bastiat, and the British radicals, who believed that republics (the closest approximation to democracy then) were more likely to engage in trade than absolutist monarchies (Doyle, 1986; Bastiat, 1862:102-3; Thomson, 1966:462). The liberal view has been criticized, not so much on the grounds that autocracies are less likely to withstand openness than democracies than on the grounds that regime type does not affect a country's propensity to engage in commercial intercourse (Gowa, 1995;Gowa and Mansfield, 1993). Echoes of the liberal creed can still be heard, though, in the form that democracies are less likely than autocracies to resort to protectionist measures when faced with a challenge (Garrett and Lange, 1995; Verdier, n.d.).Weighing the respective propensity of democracies and autocracies to liberalize trade may not be, however, the most appropriate way of tackling the question. Even if democracy were proven to be more open than autocracy, it would still not necessarily follow that democratic convergence promotes free trade. A regime, indeed, empowers a certain class of producers. Similar regimes tend to empower International Studies Quarterly (1998) 42, 1-24

State banking is the intervention of the state in the allocation of credit. State banking became important during the course of this century in some Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries but not in others and then declined in the 1980s. Why? State banking was demanded by sectors that were pressed to invest but that could not find access to long-term credit because of the marginal importance of small and local banks in countries with centralized market and state institutions. The class cleavage enabled these groups to extract state banking from central governments thanks to their pivotal role in the Right-Left rivalry. The current demise of state banking reflects the shift from class to territorial modes of interest articulation in capital markets.