International peacebuilding can improve the prospects that a civil war will be resolved. Although peacebuilding strategies must be designed to address particular conflicts, broad parameters that fit most conflicts can be identified. Strategies should address the local roots of hostility, the local capacities for change, and the (net) specific degree of international commitment available to assist sustainable peace. One can conceive of these as the three dimensions of a triangle whose area is the “political space”—or effective capacity—for building peace. We test these propositions with an extensive data set of 124 post–World War II civil wars and find that multilateral, United Nations peace operations make a positive difference. UN peacekeeping is positively correlated with democratization processes after civil war, and multilateral enforcement operations are usually successful in ending the violence. Our study provides broad guidelines for designing the appropriate peacebuilding strategy, given the mix of hostility, local capacities, and international capacities.

We use cluster analysis to develop a model of political change in the Levant as reflected in the World Event Interaction Survey coded event data generated from Reuters between 1979 and 1998. A new statistical algorithm that uses the correlation between dyadic behaviors at two times identifies clusters of political activity. The transition to a new cluster occurs when a point is closer in distance to subsequent points than to preceding ones. These clusters begin to “stretch” before breaking apart, which serves as an early warning indicator. The clusters correspond well with phases of political behavior identified a priori. A Monte Carlo analysis shows that the clustering and early warning measures are not random; they perform very differently in simulated data sets with similar statistical characteristics. Our study demonstrates that the statistical analysis of newswire reports can yield systematic early warning indicators, and it provides empirical support for the theoretical concept of distinct behavioral phases in political activity.

Why do sovereign governments make international legal commitments, and what effect does international law have on state behavior? Very little empirical research tries to answer these questions in a systematic way. This article examines patterns of commitment to and compliance with international monetary law. I consider the signal governments try to send by committing themselves through international legal commitments, and I argue that reputational concerns explain patterns of compliance. One of the most important findings is that governments commit to and comply with legal obligations if other countries in their region do so. Competitive market forces, rather than overt policy pressure from the International Monetary Fund, are the most likely “enforcement” mechanism. Legal commitment has an extremely positive effect on governments that have recently removed restrictive policies, which indicates a desire to reestablish a reputation for compliance.

Do political and fiscal decentralization make it easier or harder to control inflation? Statistical analysis of average annual inflation rates in a panel of 87 countries in the 1970s and 1980s found no clear relationship between decentralization and the level of inflation. Political decentralization, however, does appear to reduce change in countries' relative inflation rates over time. By creating additional veto players, federal structure may “lock in” existing patterns of monetary policy—whether inflationary or strict. Among the (mostly developed) countries that started with low inflation, inflation tended to increase more slowly in federations than in unitary states. Among the (mostly developing) countries that started with high inflation, inflation tended to increase faster in the federations. There is evidence that political decentralization locks in a country's degree of practical central bank independence—whether high or low—and the relative hardness or softness of budget constraints on subnational governments.

It is well established that legislators from highly professionalized bodies are more likely to win reelection than members of less professionalized legislatures. We find that the effect of professionalization on incumbent electoral success is far more pervasive. As the level of professionalism of a legislature increases, the effects of external political and economic forces (such as coattails from higher level elections and national economic conditions) on a legislator's chances for reelection diminish in strength. This implies that legislative professionalization promotes institutionalization by establishing boundaries that insulate members from external shocks. We reach these conclusions by specifying and testing a district-level model of state legislative election outcomes, using as dependent variable the probability that an incumbent will win reelection. The model is estimated with probit using data for more than 42,000 state legislators from 1970 to 1989.

Xenophon's Anabasis, a military adventure interwoven with a story of philosophical self-discovery, is a companion piece to Plato's Republic. The Anabasis takes up in deed the two great political problems treated in speech in the Republic, namely, how a just community can come into being and how philosophy and political power may be brought to coincide. In addressing the first of these problems, Xenophon makes explicit a lesson about the limits of politics that is implicit in the Republic. He speaks to the second problem by clarifying the essential role of philosophical erôs in his emergence, at the moment of crisis, as the founder and leader of a well-ordered community. Xenophon‘s self-presentation in the Anabasis, which makes clear his debt to Socrates, illuminates the nature of philosophical courage as well as the saving integrity of the philosophical soul.

Corporate political activity is usually operationalized and analyzed as financial contributions to candidates or political parties through political action committees (PACs). Very little attention has been paid to other dimensions, such as lobbying, in a systematic way. On a theoretical level we address the issue of how to conceive of PAC contributions, lobbying, and other corporate activities, such as charitable giving, in terms of the strategic behavior of corporations and the implications of “foreignness” for the different types of corporate political activity. On an empirical level we examine the political activities of Fortune 500 firms, along with an oversampling of U.S. affiliates of large foreign investors for the 1987–88 election cycle.

Thomas Smith presents an Aristotelian view of the common good that resembles much contemporary political theory in that it focuses on ethics rather than politics. Smith contends that Aristotle is a potent remedy to a society in crisis due to its unconcern about the common good. Against Smith's apolitical reading of Aristotle, we examine how Aristotle's views of common advantage, the multiple needs of citizens, and political friendship support neither harmonizing conceptions of the good nor a personal “radical conversion” that makes the common good our primary political concern. In engaging the political Aristotle, we find instead that he is concerned with the necessary conflict that resists attempts to arrive at the common advantage, with the material basis of good citizenship, and with the institutions and practices that foster a good deliberative politics.

I respond to Terchek and Moore by investigating the interrelationship of ethics to politics in Aristotle's thought. To this end I defend two claims. First, doing ethics requires understanding politics. Second, politics requires practical wisdom and ethics. Since even the politics wanted by Terchek and Moore requires these virtues, they are wrong to claim that my account of the common good, resting as it does on similar virtues, is impractical and dangerous.