We've launched a new site so please go to People & Research for current information on our faculty and staff.
Journal Articles
Abstract:
International relations scholars
increasingly debate when and how
international institutions influence
domestic policy. This examination of ethnic
politics in four Baltic and East European
countries during the 1990s shows how
European institutions shaped domestic
policy, and why these institutions sometimes
failed. Comparing traditional rational
choice mechanisms such as membership
conditionality with more socialization-based
efforts, I argue that conditionality
motivated most behavior changes, but that
socialization-based efforts often guided
them. Furthermore, using new case studies,
statistics, and counterfactual analysis, I
find that domestic opposition posed far
greater obstacles to socialization-based
methods than it did to conditionality: when
used alone, socialization-based methods
rarely changed behavior; when they did, the
domestic opposition was usually low and the
effect was only moderate. In contrast,
incentive-based methods such as membership
conditionality were crucial in changing
policy: As domestic opposition grew,
membership conditionality was not only
increasingly necessary to change behavior,
but it was also surprisingly effective.