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Controlling Institutions
How is the United States able to control the IMF with only 17 per cent of the votes? How are the rules of the global economy made? This book shows how a combination of formal and informal rules explains how international organizations really work. Randall W. Stone argues that formal rules apply in ordinary times, while informal power allows leading states to exert control when the stakes are high. International organizations are therefore best understood as equilibrium outcomes that balance the power and interests of the leading state and the member countries. Presenting a new model of institutional design and comparing the IMF, WTO, and EU, Stone argues that institutional variations reflect the distribution of power and interests. He shows that US interests influence the size, terms, and enforcement of IMF programs, and new data, archival documents, and interviews reveal the shortcomings of IMF programs in Mexico, Russia, Korea, Indonesia, and Argentina.
Lending Credibility
With the end of the Cold War, the International Monetary Fund emerged as the most powerful international institution in history. But how much influence can the IMF exert over fiercely contested issues in domestic politics that affect the lives of millions? In "Lending Credibility," Randall Stone develops the first systematic approach to answering this question. Deploying an arsenal of methods from a range of social sciences rarely combined, he mounts a forceful challenge to conventional wisdom. Focusing on the former Soviet bloc, Stone finds that the IMF is neither as powerful as some critics fear, nor as weak as others believe, but that the answer hinges on the complex factor of how much cr...
Lending Credibility
With the end of the Cold War, the International Monetary Fund emerged as the most powerful international institution in history. But how much influence can the IMF exert over fiercely contested issues in domestic politics that affect the lives of millions? In Lending Credibility, Randall Stone develops the first systematic approach to answering this question. Deploying an arsenal of methods from a range of social sciences rarely combined, he mounts a forceful challenge to conventional wisdom. Focusing on the former Soviet bloc, Stone finds that the IMF is neither as powerful as some critics fear, nor as weak as others believe, but that the answer hinges on the complex factor of how much cred...
Satellites and Commissars
Why did the Soviet Union squander the political leverage afforded by its trade subsidy to Eastern Europe? Why did Soviet officials fail to bargain with resolve, to link subsidies to salient political issues, to make credible commitments, and to monitor the satellites' policies? Using an unprecedented array of formerly secret documents housed in archives in Moscow, Warsaw, and Prague, as well as interviews with former Communist officials across Eastern Europe, Randall Stone answers these questions and others that have long vexed Western political scientists. Stone argues that trade politics revolved around the incentives created by distorted prices. The East European satellites profited by tr...
Stone on Stone
Standing in the nave of a cathedral, it is hard not to wonder how ordinary human beings could have created sky-scraping, dizzyingly high buildings on which even the top-most parts were delicately decorated, in an age before even the simplest of power tools. Stone on Stone presents the full story of the men who built the cathedrals of the medieval era: who they were, how they lived and how with the simplest of hand tools they created the astonishing buildings that hundreds of years later still stand as monuments to their ingenuity and skill. Topics covered include the context for building such huge places of worship; the men who built: who they were, and the challenges they had to face; findi...
Targeted Development
In a globalizing world, the world's wealthiest nations have found it increasingly difficult to insulate themselves from the residual impacts associated with underdevelopment abroad. Many of the ills associated with, and exacerbated by, underdevelopment cannot be confined within national borders. In Targeted Development, Sarah Blodgett Bermeo shows how wealthy states have responded to this problem by transforming the very nature of development policy. Instead of funding development projects that enhance human well-being in the most general sense, they now pursue a "targeted" strategy: advocating development abroad when and where it serves their own interests. In an era in which the ideology of "globalism" is in decline, targeted development represents a fundamental shift toward a realpolitik approach to foreign aid. Devising development plans that ultimately protect and benefit industrialized donor states now drives the agenda, while crafting effective solutions for deep-seated problems in the neediest nations is increasingly an afterthought.
Sound System
The story of one musician's journey to discover how music can be used as a political tool, for good and bad.
The Rational Design of International Institutions
International institutions vary widely in terms of key institutional features such as membership, scope, and flexibility. In this 2004 book, Barbara Koremenos, Charles Lipson, and Duncan Snidal argue that this is so because international actors are goal-seeking agents who make specific institutional design choices to solve the particular cooperation problems they face in different issue-areas. Using a Rational Design approach, they explore five features of institutions - membership, scope, centralization, control, and flexibility - and explain their variation in terms of four independent variables that characterize different cooperation problems: distribution, number of actors, enforcement, and uncertainty. The contributors to the volume then evaluate a set of conjectures in specific issue areas ranging from security organizations to trade structures to rules of war to international aviation. Alexander Wendt appraises the entire Rational Design model of evaluating international organizations and the authors respond in a conclusion that sets forth both the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach.
Theory of Moves
Steven J. Brams' Theory of Moves, though based on the classical theory of games, proposes changes in its rules to render it a truly dynamic theory. By postulating that players think ahead not just to the immediate consequences of making moves, but also to the consequences of countermoves to these moves, counter-countermoves, and so on, it extends the strategic analysis of conflicts into the more distant future. It elucidates the role that different kinds of power - moving, order and threat - may have on conflict outcomes, and it also shows how misinformation affects player choices. Applied to a series of cases drawn from politics, economics, sociology, fiction and the Bible, the theory provides not only a parsimonious explanation of their outcomes, but also shows why they unfolded as they did. This book, which assumes no prior knowledge of game theory or special mathematical background, will be of interest to scholars and students throughout the social sciences.
The Oxford Handbook of the Political Economy of International Trade
The Oxford Handbook of the Political Economy of International Trade surveys the literature on the politics of international trade and highlights the most exciting recent scholarly developments. The Handbook is focused on work by political scientists that draws extensively on work in economics, but is distinctive in its applications and attention to political features; that is, it takes politics seriously. The Handbook's framework is organized in part along the traditional lines of domestic society-domestic institutions - international interaction, but elaborates this basic framework to showcase the most important new developments in our understanding of the political economy of trade. Within...
