Theories explaining government size and its consequences are of two varieties. The first portrays government as a provider of public goods and a corrector of externalities. The second associates larger governments with bureaucratic inefficiency and special-interest-group influence. What...

Existing empirical models of international co-operation emphasize domestic determinants, although virtually all theories of international relations focus on interdependencies between countries. This article examines how much states' linkages with the international system, relative to domestic...

This article reviews the existing theoretical arguments and empirical findings linking renewable and non-renewable natural resources to the onset, intensity, and duration of intrastate as well as interstate armed conflict. Renewable resources are supposedly connected to conflict via scarcity,...

The argument that environmental change is an important driving force of migration has experienced a strong revival in the climate change context. While various studies predict large environmental migration flows due to climate change and other environmental events, the ex post empirical evidence...

Much of the International Relations literature assumes that there is a “depth versus participation” dilemma in international politics: shallower international agreements attract more countries and greater depth is associated with less participation. We argue that this conjecture is too...

This paper is now published as:Bernauer, Thomas, Kalbhenn, Anna, Spilker, Gabriele, Koubi, Vally. 2010. A Comparison of International and Domestic Sources of Global Governance Dynamics: Explaining Global Environmental Treaty Ratifications, 1950-2000. British Journal of Political Science...

We study the behavior of defense spending in Switzerland in 1975-2001. Our main interest is in determining how neutrality in international affairs (non-membership in military alliances) affects defense spending. We find that neutrality is associated with a perception of lower levels of external...

We argue that participation in international agreements is influenced by their design characteristics, notably commitment levels, measured by the specificity of obligations, and compliance mechanisms, measured by monitoring, enforcement, assistance, and dispute settlement provisions in treaties....