A key assumption of audience costs theories of crisis bargaining and international cooperation is that audience members have strong preferences for consistency between their leader's commitments and actual policy choices. However, audiences also have strong preferences over the policy choices themselves, regardless of their consistency with past commitments. I conducted a randomized survey experiment to evaluate the magnitude of consistency and policy effects in the context of international agreements over trade policy. Respondents with expressed policy preferences, whether supporting or opposing free trade, have muted reactions to learning that their leader has broken an agreement. Only respondents with no opinion on trade policy are affected by learning that their leader's policy is inconsistent with prior commitments. This suggests that constituents' underlying preferences limit the degree to which audience costs influence policymakers' calculations.

If international institutions are such potent alarm mechanisms that mobilize procompliance domestic audiences, as many existing theories argue, why do countries wait so long before sounding the alarm? World Trade Organization (WTO) members often wait months or even years before objecting to their trading partners’ WTO-illegal barriers. To turn a phrase, trade cooperation delayed is trade cooperation denied, so why wait? To explain this variation, I develop a theory of institutional alarm mechanisms in which (1) the preferences and strength of the audience hearing the alarm vary and (2) the decision to sound the alarm is strategic. Sounding the alarm is most valuable when strong audiences in the defendant country support compliance. I test this prediction using competing risks models analyzing the timing of WTO disputes against US tariff barriers. Consistent with the theory, disputes are more likely during election years when macroeconomic indicators suggest broader support for free trade.

Following older debates in international relations literature concerning the relative importance of domestic versus systemic factors, newer debates emphasize interdependence among states and the complex interactions between systemic and domestic factors. As globalization and democratization advance, theories and empirical models of international politics have become more complicated. We present a systematic theoretical categorization of relationships between domestic and systemic variables. We use this categorization so that scholars can match their theory to the appropriate empirical model and assess the degree to which systemic factors affect their arguments. We also present two advances at the frontier of these empirical models. In one, we combine hierarchical models of moderating relationships with spatial models of interdependence among units within a system. In the other, we provide a model for analyzing spatial interdependence that varies over time. This enables us to examine how the level of interdependence among units has evolved. We illustrate our categorization and new models by revisiting the recent international political economy (IPE) debate over the relationship between trade policy and regime type in developing countries.

What types of countries have ratified the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court? Because the court relies on state cooperation, it is a good example of a regime facing a ''participation problem.'' In order to be effective, the regime requires active members, but states that fear regime effectiveness will therefore find it potentially costly to join. We analyze the extent to which this problem plagues the ICC. We find that countries for whom compliance is likely to be easiest-democracies with little internal violence-are the most likely countries to join the ICC. On the other hand, countries with the most to fear from ICC prosecution, nondemocracies with weak legal systems and a history of domestic political violence, tend to avoid ratification. We contrast our findings with those of a recent article by Simmons and Danner (2010), arguing that ratification patterns show evidence of credible commitments. Our analysis across a breadth of evidence, both descriptive and multivariate, suggests caution toward arguments about the impact of the ICC on global practices and provides support for the notion that states strategically select themselves into supranational judicial agreements.

Recent research, including an article by Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz in this journal, has argued that the United States' long-standing foreign policy orientation of liberal internationalism has been in serious decline because of rising domestic partisan divisions. A reanalysis of the theoretical logic driving these arguments and the empirical evidence used to support them suggests a different conclusion. Extant evidence on congressional roll call voting and public opinion surveys, which is often used to support the claim that liberal internationalism has declined, as well as new evidence about partisan divisions in Congress using policy gridlock and cosponsorship data from other studies of American politics do not demonstrate the decline in bipartisanship in foreign policy that conventional wisdom suggests. The data also do not show evidence of a Vietnam War or a post–Cold War effect on domestic partisan divisions on foreign policy. Contrary to the claims of recent literature, the data show that growing domestic political divisions over foreign policy have not made liberal internationalism impossible. It persists as a possible grand strategy for the United States in part because of globalization pressures.