Nonstate actors, such as international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and multinational corporations (MNCs), have attained an increasingly prominent role in modern world affairs. While previous research has focused on these actors' respective interactions with states, little attention has been paid to their interactions with each other. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the decisions of private actors seeking to invest abroad are affected by the reputational costs of doing business in countries publicly targeted by human rights activists. We find that ''naming and shaming'' by human rights INGOs tends to reduce the amount of foreign direct investment received by developing states, providing evidence that INGO activities affect the behavior of MNCs. An additional implication of our findings is that shaming by INGOs can impose real costs on targeted states in the form of lost investment.

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Though there is widespread scholarly consensus that American political elites have become increasingly ideologically polarized, there remains debate about how the mass electorate has responded to the increase in polarization at the elite level. This article shows that as party elites have become more polarized, individuals have become better able to identify the party that best matches their own ideological positions, thereby contributing to polarization at the mass level. Using forty years of ANES and DW-NOMINATE data to test this argument, it was found that the relationship between a voter’s position in policy space and their political behavior is indeed conditional upon polarization at the elite level. This finding demonstrates how changes in elite polarization translate to behavioral changes on the mass level.

We analyze how the deployment of US troops affects host-state defense spending. We test this relationship, from 1951 to 2003, by examining how the deployment of US military forces impacts defense spending in different types of states, including US allies, NATO members, non-allies of the United States, and all states. We also utilize spatial measures of US troop deployments to analyze how regional and neighborhood concentrations of forces shape host-state policies. Using both traditional panel methodology, and incorporating a simultaneous equation model for the deployment of troops, we find that non-allied states tend to decrease their defense burden when the United States places troops within their borders. However, NATO allies consistently increase their defense burden in response to the presence of US troops within their borders. Additionally, most states tend to increase spending when the United States places troops near their borders

What determines the location of those human rights international non-governmental organization (INGO) resources found outside of the highly developed Western democracies? We draw a distinction between the bottom-up mobilization processes driving the location of human rights organization (HRO) members from the top-down strategic concerns driving where HRO leaders place permanent offices. In particular, we find that, while political opportunity structures generally increase the likelihood that a state has HRO members, it has a curvilinear influence on the number of HRO secretariats, which typically locate in areas seen as having a higher need for organizational resources. Further, while there is no clear connection between human rights abuses and HRO memberships in a state, HROs' strategic concerns lead them to place offices with reference to both local and neighborhood "need"-in other words, levels of repression.Colin M. Barry is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma. His research concerns the politics of globalization, focusing in particular on nonstate actors and the sociopolitical ramifications of their transnational activities. His work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Peace Research.Sam R. Bell is an assistant professor of political science at Kansas State University. His work focuses on the role of information diffusion, transparency, and non-governmental organizations on different international security and human security outcomes.