The ability to monitor state behavior has become a critical tool of international governance. Systematic monitoring allows for the creation of numerical indicators that can be used to rank, compare, and essentially censure states. This article argues that the ability to disseminate such numerical indicators widely and instantly constitutes an exercise of social power, with the potential to change important policy outputs. It explores this argument in the context of the United States' efforts to combat trafficking in persons and find evidence that monitoring has important effects: Countries are more likely to criminalize human trafficking when they are included in the U.S. annual Trafficking in Persons Report, and countries that are placed on a "watch list" are also more likely to criminalize. These findings have broad implications for international governance and the exercise of soft power in the global information age.

The EU's newly launched European neighbourhood policy (ENP) is a fascinating case study in organizational management theory of how the Commission strategically adapted enlargement policies to expand its foreign policy domain. From the use of action plans, regular reports and negotiations to the larger conceptualization and use of socialization and conditionality, the development of the policy shows significant mechanical borrowing from the enlargement strategies. Given the lack of the membership carrot, the question is whether such adaptation from enlargement can promote political reforms in the ENP countries, which are generally poor, often autocratic and, in some cases, embroiled in domestic conflicts. This article traces the development of the policy and assesses prospects for human rights and democracy reforms.

International relations scholars increasingly debate when and how international institutions influence domestic policy+ This examination of ethnic politics in four Baltic and East European countries during the 1990s shows how European institutions shaped domestic policy, and why these institutions sometimes failed+ Comparing traditional rational choice mechanisms such as membership conditionality with more socialization-based efforts, I argue that conditionality motivated most behavior changes, but that socialization-based efforts often guided them+ Furthermore, using new case studies, statistics, and counterfactual analysis, I find that domestic opposition posed far greater obstacles to socialization-based methods than it did to conditionality: when used alone, socialization-based methods rarely changed behavior; when they did, the domestic opposition was usually low and the effect was only moderate+ In contrast, incentive-based methods such as membership conditionality were crucial in changing policy: As domestic opposition grew, membership conditionality was not only increasingly necessary to change behavior, but it was also surprisingly effective+ Although several international organizations~IOs! participated actively in Eastern Europe's ethnic politics during the past decade, research on their role tends to focus on a single institution and the particular strategy it applied+ The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe~OSCE! has been praised for easing ethnic tensions, but studies rarely focus on its concrete policy effects or they ignore This article sorts out the institutional effects for the first time by using extensive new data to compare how the OSCE, the CE, and the EU influenced the governments of Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania to pass certain ethnic minority legislation during the 1990s+ I argue that socialization-based methods such as persuasion and social influence were not very effective when they were used alone, and I show, both through quantitative and qualitative analysis, that more rationalchoice-based efforts such as membership conditionality were crucial in changing policy+ 3 I make three propositions+ First, membership conditionality by the EU and occasionally by the CE motivated most policy decisions, but socialization-based efforts often guided them+ Case after case illustrates the link between conditionality and decisions to change policies, but the cases also show how the CE and especially the OSCE often shaped the substance of the solutions+ Second, domestic opposition posed greater obstacles to socialization-based efforts than it did to membership conditionality: when European institutions used only socialization-based efforts-which they did quite frequently-governments rarely changed their behavior+ Socialization-based efforts alone failed in particular when the domestic opposition was strong+ Subsequently, in the rare cases when socialization-based efforts did influence ethnic policy without the added use of conditionality, the domestic opposition was ...

What do countries do when they have committed to a treaty, but then find that commitment challenged? After the creation of the International Criminal Court, the United States tried to get countries, regardless of whether they were parties to the Court or not, to sign agreements not to surrender Americans to the Court. Why did some states sign and others not? Given United States power and threats of military sanctions, some states did sign. However, such factors tell only part of the story. When refusing to sign, many states emphasized the moral value of the court. Further, states with a high domestic rule of law emphasized the importance of keeping their commitment. This article therefore advances two classic arguments that typically are difficult to substantiate; namely, state preferences are indeed partly normative, and international commitments do not just screen states; they also constrain.

Given that states have long considered elections a purely domestic matter, the dramatic growth of international election monitoring in the 1990s was remarkable+ Why did states allow international organizations and nongovernmental organizations~NGOs! to interfere and why did international election monitoring spread so quickly? Why did election monitoring become institutionalized in so many organizations? Perhaps most puzzling, why do countries invite monitors and nevertheless cheat? This article develops a rigorous method for investigating the causal mechanisms underlying the rise of election monitoring, and "norm cascades" more gener-ally+ The evolution and spread of norms, as with many other social processes, are complex combinations of normative, instrumental, and other constraints and causes of action+ The rise of election monitoring has been driven by an interaction of instrumentalism, emergent norms, and fundamental power shifts in the international system+ By dissecting this larger theoretical complexity into specific subclaims that can be empirically investigated, this article examines the role of each of these causal factors, their mutual tensions, and their interactive contributions to the evolution of election monitoring+International election monitoring has existed in various forms for decades, 1 but its dramatic growth in the 1990s was particularly remarkable+ 2 Whereas few elec-