Miriam Fendius Elman

The Foreign Policies of Small States: Challenging Neorealism in Its Own Backyard

The received wisdom in international relations suggests that we can best account for the foreign policies of small states by examining structural/systemic rather than domestic level factors. This article challenges this scholarly consensus. The distribution of power and the balance of threat do influence domestic institutional formation and change in emerging states. However, the subsequent military strategies of these weak states are likely to reflect such domestic institutional choices in a number of important and predictable ways. The article tests this argument against pre-1900 US domestic regime change and foreign security policy. The historical evidence suggests that while international preconditions were critically linked to constitutional reform, the institutional structures and rules of democratic presidentialism affected both the timing and substance of US military strategies in later periods. The US case study provides a springboard for speculating on the international context of democratization in Eastern Europe and the long-term foreign-policy consequences of this domestic regime choice.

Unpacking democracy: Presidentialism, parliamentarism, and theories of democratic peace

T AKEN AS A body, the pervasiveness and popularity of literature on the democratic peace is fast approaching Microsoft-like proportions. Despite this remarkable growth, however, proponents continue to make a variety of different and sometimes conflicting causal claims about relationships between domestic political arrangements and a medley of conflict related variables, chief among them involvement in war. Notwithstanding the extraordinary expansion and variety of works debating these relationships, some surprisingly widespread lacunae persist. This article addresses one such gap: almost all advocates of democratic peace hypotheses treat democracy as a single undifferentiated category. This failure to break democracy down into different majoritarian and nonmajoritarian subtypes results in underspecified causal models, and an overstatement of the ambit of a variety of democratic peace phenomena. International relations scholars who argue that there is a connection between democracy and conflict related behavior have yet to reach consensus on the nature of the relationship, the specific causal pathways that underlie it, or the classes of behavior that are covered. One well-known division arises from disagreements about the comparative validity of dyadic and monadic democratic peace claims. According to the more popular dyadic version of the democratic peace theory, democracies are peaceful when interacting with each other, and they identify

How not to be Lakatos intolerant: Appraising progress in IR research

Despite the popularity of Imre Lakatoss ideas and numerous references to his Methodology of Scientific Research Programs (MSRP), IR scholars often misstate and misapply his criteria for appraising theoretical development. This article provides a more complete description of Lakatoss metric, addresses a number of critiques related to its use, and surveys how MSRP has been used to evaluate IR research. It suggests that IR proponents of Lakatoss methodology could better appreciate the limits of its application, and that those who use his metric could do so in a more informed way. The article argues for a sustained discussion about the promises and difficulties of theory appraisal, and suggests that MSRP may be a useful point of departure for that dialogue. It calls for IR theorists to undertake comparative analyses of different rationalist metrics to provide the basis for making informed judgments about their different strengths and weaknesses in helping to produce better theories.

Diplomatic History and International Relations Theory: Respecting Difference and Crossing Boundaries

I n the following collection of essays, a group of distinguished scholars present a variety of viewpoints on the feasibility of cross-fertilization between history and political science.’ Specifically, diplomatic historians and international relations theorists take stock of the differences and similarities between the two disciplines, and suggest ways in which these scholars can usefully learn from one another.’ This conversation is particularly timely because it may demonstrate our common interest in producing objective, rigorous, and theoretically oriented qualitative research. As Stephen H. Haber, David M. Kennedy, and Stephen D. Krasner

The Never-Ending Story: Democracy and Peace

Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security, John M. Owen IV (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). 246 pp., cloth (ISBN: 0-8014-3319-3),

Does Democracy Tame the Radicals? Lessons from Israel's Jewish Religious Political Parties

35.00. Regional Orders at Centurys Dawn: Global and Domestic Influences on Grand Strategy, Etel Solingen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). 334 pp., paper (ISBN: 0-6910-5880-6),

Democracy, Security, and Religious Political Parties: A Framework for Analysis

19.95; cloth (ISBN: 0-6910-5879-2),

Review Article: International History and the Democratic Peace

65.00. Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another, Spencer R. Weart (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998). 424 pp., cloth (ISBN: 0-300-07017-9),

Paths to peace : is democracy the answer?

35.00. Books reviewed in this essay: Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security , John M. Owen IV Regional Orders at Centurys Dawn: Global and Domestic Influences on Grand Strategy , Etel Solingen Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another , Spencer R. Weart

Progress in international relations theory : appraising the field

Abstract This article considers how participation in the democratic political process influences the platforms and strategies of Israels Jewish religious political parties. Focusing on the religious political parties that contested the March 2006 election in Israel, the article suggests that party ideology strongly influences the extent to which Israels religious political parties have taken up moderate positions regarding Israels internal and external security policies, especially with regard to religion and state issues; the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; and Israels withdrawal from the post-1967 occupied territories. Ideology, however, is not determinative – regular participation in the electoral process and access to government resources has over time also worked to moderate initially hardline party positions. The fact that religious political parties typically serve as pivotal parties in Israels governing coalitions accounts for why these parties, and their constituents, have largely avoided extremism. As a result of the integration of religious political parties into Israels proportional representation, multi-party system, extremist violence in Israel has tended to be extra-parliamentary.