Scholars have long debated the relative influence of domestic and international factors on the presidential use of force+ On one matter, however, consensus reigns: the U+S+ Congress is presumed irrelevant+ This presumption, we demonstrate, does not hold up to empirical scrutiny+ Using a variety of measures and models, we show a clear connection between the partisan composition of Congress and the quarterly frequency of major uses of force between 1945 and 2000; we do not find any congressional influence, however, on minor uses of force+ We recommend that the quantitative use-of-force literature in international relations begin to take seriously theories of domestic political institutions, partisanship, and interbranch relations that have been developed within American politics+

Scholars and policymakers alike have recently begun to tout the ability of international organizations (IOs) to encourage and secure democracy throughout the world. Despite this stance, little theoretical attention or empirical investigation has attempted to ascertain why or whether this relationship truly exists. One challenge to answering this puzzle is that extant theories of international institutions do not generally delineate clear hypotheses about how IOs influence domestic politics. In this article, I address this paucity of both theory and empirical evidence. I delineate three causal mechanisms that link IOs to domestic actors' calculations about political liberalization and test the argument. I find that membership in regional IOs is correlated with transitions to democracy during the period from 1950 to 1992.

This article summarizes the new Correlates of War 2 International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) data. The data in the Correlates of War IGO data sets capture state memberships in the network of international governmental organizations. The expanded version 2.0 updates the original Wallace and Singer (1970) data set to provide membership information from1964 to 2001. Following a brief review of the literature pertaining to IGOs and world politics, we provide descriptions of all three versions of the data (country-year, IGO-year, and joint dyadic membership), discuss coding rules and subsequent changes to the data, and present graphical representations of changes in the network of IGOs over time using all three versions of the data.

The relationship between foreign trade and political conflict has been a persistent source of controversy among scholars of international relations. Existing empirical studies of this topic have focused on the effects of trade flows on conflict, but they have largely ignored the institutional context in which trade is conducted. In this article we present some initial quantitative results pertaining to the influence on military disputes of preferential trading arrangements (PTAs), a broad class of commercial institutions that includes free trade areas, common markets, and customs unions. We argue that parties to the same PTA are less prone to disputes than other states and that hostilities between PTA members are less likely to occur as trade flows rise between them. Moreover, we maintain that heightened commerce is more likely to inhibit conflict between states that belong to the same preferential grouping than between states that do not. Our results accord with this argument. Based on an analysis of the period since World War II, we find that trade flows have relatively little effect on the likelihood of disputes between states that do not participate in the same PTA. Within PTAs, however, there is a strong, inverse relationship between commerce and conflict. Parties to such an arrangement are less likely to engage in hostilities than other states, and the likelihood of a military dispute dips markedly as trade increases between them.

International organizations~IOs! have become increasingly pervasive features of the global landscape+ While the implications of this development have been studied extensively, relatively little research has examined the factors that prompt states to enter IOs+ We argue that democratization is an especially potent impetus to IO membership+ Democratizing countries are likely to enter IOs because leaders have difficulty credibly committing to sustain liberal reforms and the consolidation of democracy+ Chief executives often have an incentive to solidify their position during democratic transitions by rolling back political liberalization+ Entering an IO can help leaders in transitional states credibly commit to carry out democratic reforms, especially if the organization is composed primarily of democratic members+ Tests of this hypothesis, based on a new data set of IOs covering the period from 1965 to 2000, confirm that democratization spurs states to join IOs+ In recent years, international organizations~IOs! have become increasingly pervasive features of the global landscape+ Both the number of such organizations and the range of issue-areas they cover have grown rapidly+ The implications of this development have been studied extensively and hotly debated in the field of international relations+ Whereas some researchers believe that IOs have little effect on state behavior, many observers argue that the proliferation of these institutions will facilitate interstate cooperation and help to resolve the interstate conflicts that do arise+ 1 In contrast, relatively little research has been conducted on the factors that prompt states to enter IOs+ This gap in the literature is both surprising and important+ While many countries have rushed to join IOs, others participate in few of these organizations+ What determines the propensity of states to join IOs?