David A. Lake

The Invisible Hand of Democracy: Political Control and the Provision of Public Services

Despite considerable normative support, analysts have failed to identify any systematic effects of democracy on domestic policy outputs. Building on a theory of the state as a monopoly producer of public services and establishing a common foundation for studying variations in regimes and their policy consequences, the authors hypothesize that democratic states will earn fewer monopoly rents and produce a higher level of services than autocracies. They test this hypothesis both cross-sectionally and over time for a variety of public health and education indicators. The statistical results strongly support their hypotheses. The authors conclude that democracy has real, substantively important effects on the daily lives and well-being of individuals around the globe.

Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War.

Democracies are less likely to fight wars with each other. They are also more likely to prevail in wars with autocratic states. I offer an explanation of this syndrome of powerful pacifism drawn from the microeconomic theory of the state. State rent seeking creates an imperialist bias in a countrys foreign policy. This bias is smallest in democracies, where the costs to society of controlling the state are relatively low, and greatest in autocracies, where the costs are higher. As a result of this bias, autocracies will be more expansionist and, in turn, war-prone. In their relations with each other, where the absence of this imperialist bias is manifest, the relative pacifism of democracies appears. In addition, democracies, constrained by their societies from earning rents, will devote greater absolute resources to security, enjoy greater societal support for their policies, and tend to form overwhelming countercoalitions against expansionist autocracies. It follows that democracies will be more likely to win wars.

Delegation and Agency in International Organizations

Part I. Introduction: 1. Delegation under anarchy: states, international organizations, and principal-agent theory Darren G. Hawkins, David A. Lake, Daniel L. Nielson and Michael J. Tierney Part II. Variation in Principal Preferences, Structure, Decision Rules, and Private Benefits: 2. A problem of principals: common agency and social lending at the multilateral development banks Mona Lyne, Daniel L. Nielson and Michael J. Tierney 3. US domestic politics and international monetary fund policy J. Lawrence Broz and Michael Brewster Hawes 4. Why multilateralism? Foreign aid and domestic principal-agent problems Helen V. Milner 5. Distribution, information, and delegation to international organizations: the case of IMF conditionality Lisa L. Martin 6. Delegation and discretion in the European Union Mark A. Pollack Part III. Variation in Agent Preferences, Legitimacy, Tasks, and Permeability: 7. How agents matter Darren G. Hawkins and Wade Jacoby 8. Screening power: international organizations as informative agents Alexander Thompson 9. Dutiful agents, rogue actors, or both? Staffing, voting rules, and slack in the WHO and WTO Andrew P. Cortell and Susan Peterson 10. Delegating IMF conditionality: understanding variations in control and conformity Erica R. Gould 11. Delegation to international courts and the limits of recontracting political power Karen J. Alter Part IV. Directions for Future Research: 12. The logic of delegation to international organizations David A. Lake and Mathew McCubbins.

The Political Economy of Growth: Democracy and Human Capital

Democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy. We argue that there are significant indirect effects of democracy on growth through public health and education. Where economists use life expectancy and education as proxies for human capital, we expect democracy will be an important determinant of the level of public services manifested in these indicators. In addition to whatever direct effect democracy may have on growth, we predict an important indirect effect through public policies that condition the level of human capital in different societies. We conduct statistical investigations into the direct and indirect effects of democracy on growth using a data set consisting of a 30-year panel of 128 countries. We find that democracy has no statistically significant direct effect on growth. Rather, we discover that the effect of democracy is largely indirect through increased life expectancy in poor countries and increased secondary education in nonpoor countries. T he relationship between democracy and economic growth has received considerable attention in recent years. As yet, however, there is no consensus among analysts on the relationship between these two widely studied variables. Sound theoretical positions have been advanced suggesting that democracy is both an impediment and facilitator of growth. Careful quantitative tests of the relationship have produced contradictory results. In our view, existing studies fail to develop an adequate political theory of growth and as a result their empirical models are typically misspecified. With competing arguments on both sides of the question, many analysts merely add a variable for democracy to existing economic models and then look at the sign of the coefficient and its significance. This is inadequate. Democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy. We argue that there are important indirect effects of democracy on growth that are manifested through public health and education. Where economists typically use life expectancy and secondary school enrollment as proxies for human capital, we expect that democracy will itself be an important determinant of the level of public services captured in these indicators. Thus, in

Hierarchy in international relations

International authority -- International hierarchy -- Patterns of hierarchy -- Domination -- Subordination.

Delegation and Agency in International Organizations: Delegation under anarchy: states, international organizations, and principal-agent theory

In December 1999, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into a mob protesting the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. A central theme of this and similar anti-globalization protests is that the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and other global institutions are “runaway” international bureaucracies implementing a “Washington consensus” formulated by professional economists and other neo-liberals who have made their careers within these agencies (Stiglitz 2002; Rich 1994). Other critics charge that these international organizations (IOs) are imperialist tools of the powerful, exploiting poor and disadvantaged countries for the benefit of the West. Although they have not yet taken to the streets, American conservatives, at the other end of the spectrum, argue that these IOs fail to promote the interests of the United States (Meltzer Commission Report 1999; Krauthammer 2001). Meanwhile, Europeans complain about the “democratic deficit” within the European Union (see Pollack 2003a: 407–14). As the EU expands its competencies and grows to twenty-five members, critics charge that the simultaneous deepening and broadening of the union is driven by unaccountable bureaucrats in the European Commission and the highly insulated judges of the European Court of Justice. Divorced from electoral pressures, these increasingly powerful EU institutions have allegedly escaped popular control. French and Dutch voters retaliated against the Brussels-led integration project by rejecting the proposed EU Constitution in June 2005.

Governance in a global economy : political authority in transition

List of Contributors vii Acknowledgments xiii Chapter 1: Globalization and Governance by Miles Kahler and David A. Lake 1 Part 1. Globalization and Changing Locations of Governance Chapter 2: The Leverage of Economic Theories: Explaining Governance in an Internationalized Industry by Lisa L. Martin 33 Chapter 3: Political Integration and Disintegration in the Global Economy by Michael J. Hiscox 60 Chapter 4: Globalization and Fiscal Decentralization by Geoffrey Garrett and Jonathan Rodden 87 Chapter 5: Globalization and Demands for Regional Autonomy in Europe by Pieter Van Houten 110 Chapter 6: Monetary Governance in a World of Regional Currencies by Benjamin J. Cohen 136 Chapter 7: Governing Global Financial Markets: International Responses to the Hedge-Fund Problem by Barry Eichengreen 168 Chapter 8: Public and Private Governance in Setting International Standards by Walter Mattli 199 Chapter 9: Globalization and Industry Self-Regulation by Virginia Haufler 226 Part 2. Convergence in National Governance Chapter 10: International Capital Mobility and National Policy Divergence by Ronald Rogowski 255 Chapter 11: Globalization and Policy Diffusion: Explaining Three Decades of Liberalization by Beth A. Simmons and Zachary Elkins 275 Chapter 12: Corporate Governance: Global Markets, National Politics by Peter Gourevitch 305 Chapter 13: Globalization, Institutions, and Convergence: Fiscal Adjustment in Europe by Kathleen R. McNamara 332 Part 3. Democratic Deficits and the Problem of Accountability Chapter 14: Democracy, Accountability, and Rights in Supranational Governance by James A. Caporaso 361 Chapter 15: Redefining Accountability for Global Governance Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. 386 Chapter 16: Globalization and Changing Patterns of Political Authority by Miles Kahler and David A. Lake 412 References 439 Index 481

Toward a Realist Theory of State Action

The realities of interdependence dictate that the ability of governments to pursue domestic policies effectively is influenced and constrained by developments in the international system. It is equally evident that the realization of international objectives depends meaningfully on domestic politics and economics. Our purpose in this paper is to lay the foundation for a Realist theory of state action which bridges domestic and international politics. We proceed by positing assumptions about state objectives and deducing strategies relevant to their pursuit. First, we examine conceptions of the state found in classical and structural Realism. Second, we present two models or “faces” of state action which relate the goals of state officials in one arena to the strategies available in the pursuit of such goals in the other. Third, building upon these two models, we put forth several hypotheses which explore the types of challenges to the state that arise in one arena that may trigger responses in the second. Fourth, we introduce variations in domestic and international structures and predict the choice of strategy made by the states across venues. Finally, a concluding section examines the implications of this effort for future Realist inquiry and the study of domestic and international politics.

Escape from the State of Nature: Authority and Hierarchy in World Politics

Despite increasing attention, scholars lack the analytic tools necessary to understand international hierarchy and its consequences for politics and policy. This is especially true for the informal hierarchies now found in world affairs. Rooted in a formal-legal tradition, international relations scholars almost universally assume that the international system is a realm of anarchy. Although the fact of anarchy remains a truism for the system as a whole, it is a fallacy of division to infer that all relationships within that system are anarchic. Building on an alternative view of relational authority and recent research on the practice of sovereignty, a new conception of international hierarchy is developed that varies along two continua defined by security and economic relations. This construct is operationalized and validated, and then tested in a large-nstudy of the effects of international hierarchy on the defense effort of countries. The principal finding is that states in hierarchical relationships spend significantly less on defense relative to gross domestic product than states not in such relationships. In short, hierarchy matters and subordination pays; states appear to trade some portion of their sovereignty for protection from external security threats.

The Second Face of Hegemony: Britain's Repeal of the Corn Laws and the American Walker Tariff of 1846

One challenge facing hegemonic stability theory is to specify the processes by which hegemonic countries construct and maintain a liberal international economic order. Earlier studies have focused on direct coercion or ideological manipulation by the hegemon as a principal technique for manipulating the trade policies of other countries. This article explores a different “face†of hegemony. Specifically, we contend that by altering relative prices through the exercise of their international market power, hegemonic leaders influence the trade policy preferences of their foreign trading partners. We examine this argument in the case of the American Walker Tariff of 1846. American tariff liberalization was intimately related to Britains repeal of its Corn Laws. In the antebellum United States, Northern protectionist and Southern free trade proclivities were fixed; Western grain growers held the balance of power. By allowing access to its lucrative grain market, Britain altered the economic and political incentives of Western agriculturalists and facilitated the emergence of the free trade coalition essential to the passage of the Walker Tariff.