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The authors examine U.S. public attitudes regarding global climate change, addressing the puzzle of why support for governmental action on this front is tepid relative to what existing theories predict. Introducing the theoretical concept of relative sociotropic time horizons, the authors show that believers in Christian end-times theology are less likely to support policies designed to curb global warming than are other Americans. They then provide robustness checks by analyzing other policy attitudes. In so doing, the authors provide empirical evidence to suggest that citizens possessing shorter “shadows of the future” often resist policies trading short-term costs for hypothetical long-term benefits.

This article explores the constructivists' institutional socialization hypothesis, positing that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) make member-state interests more similar over time, thus promoting interest convergence. We first show how this hypothesis can be tested systematically using relatively new data on dyadic interest similarity and joint structured IGO membership, and then we conduct a series of empirical tests. Our results show strong statistical support for the institutional socialization hypothesis, using both global and more restricted regional samples. We also demonstrate how our results are consistent with a longer-term socialization process and cannot be explained by the short-term effect of institutional information. Finally, we show some limits to the institutional socialization hypothesis. Unstructured IGOs reveal no effect in promoting member-state interest convergence. Following recent theory arguing that great powers in the international system often use IGOs for coercive means, we find that institutional socialization gets weaker as the power imbalance within the dyad grows.Thanks to Chuck Boehmer, Heather Elko McKibben, Kate Floros, Erik Gartzke, Chuck Gochman, Michael Goodhart, Yoram Haftel, Volker Krause, Dan London, Andrew Long, Ed Mansfield, Lisa Martin, Tim Nordstrom, Zeki Sarigil, Meg Shannon, Dan Thomas, Lora Viola, Basak Yavcan, and two anonymous reviewers for data, comments, and/or helpful suggestions.

If different producer groups have divergent interests concerning macroeconomic policies, how do societal preferences translate into state policy outcomes? I develop and test a party-as-agent framework for understanding the importance of societal preferences with regard to monetary policy under capital mobility. Following the principal-agent model, political parties function as agents for different societal principals. Rightist parties tend to represent internationally oriented business groups with preferences for monetary convergence, while leftist parties do the same for domestically oriented groups preferring monetary autonomy under capital mobility. I present statistical evidence showing that OECD leftist governments have been associated with more monetary autonomy and currency variability than their rightist counterparts, even after controlling for basic economic indicators such as inflation. The statistical evidence also shows that societal group size tends not to explain either autonomous monetary policy choices or exchangerate stability. Thus even large and wealthy societal groups may be unable to obtain their preferred policy outcome when their respective partisan agents do not hold government power.

We offer a theory explaining how alliances as international security regimes reduce military conflict between member-states through their internal provision of information concerning national military capabilities+ Bargaining models of war have shown that a lack of information about relative military capabilities functions as an important cause of war+ We argue that alliances provide such information to internal participants, and greater knowledge within the alliance about memberstate military capabilities reduces certain informational problems that could potentially lead to war+ This internal information effect, however, is a conditional one+ We posit that the information provided within the alliance matters most for dyads at or near power parity: the cases where states are most uncertain about who would prevail if a military conflict did emerge+ In power preponderant dyads where the outcome of a potential military conflict is relatively certain, the internal information provided by military alliances becomes less important+ Our statistical results provide strong support for these theoretical arguments+ In what is perhaps the largest research program in the discipline of international relations, scholars continue to explore the determinants of war and interstate military conflict+ Quantitative models in this research program commonly use a dyadyear unit of analysis and almost always include a variable for joint alliance membership+ Indeed, this variable represents a key part of what has become the "standard model" of interstate military conflict, 1 following Oneal and Russett's seminal paper on the subject+ 2 Our greatest thanks go to Ashley Leeds, who made available an advance copy of the ATOP 3+0 data set+ This article also benefited from presentations at the University of Wisconsin and at ISA-South in Columbia, S+C+ Finally, we thank Lisa Martin, two anonymous reviewers,