In this article, we incorporate the study of diasporas into international relations (IR) theory by focusing on diasporas as independent actors who actively influence their homeland (kin-state) foreign policies. We argue that diasporic influences can best be understood by situating them in the ‘theoretical space’ shared by constructivism and liberalism; two approaches that acknowledge the impact of identity and domestic politics on international behavior. We also maintain that the exploration of diasporic activities can enrich both constructivism and liberalism. First, diasporas' identity-based motivations should be an integral part of the constructivist effort to explain the formation of national identities. Second, diasporic activities and influences in their homelands expand the meaning of the term ‘domestic politics’ to include not only politics inside the state but also inside the people For the liberal approach, this is a “new fact” in the Lakatosian sense of the word. We theorize that the extent of diasporic influence on homeland foreign policy is determined by three components that make up the ‘balance of power’ between homelands and diasporas. We then test this theory by delving into the interaction between the newly established state of Armenia and its powerful diaspora, and by comparing this case with examples taken from the relations between Israel and diaspora Jews.

This article highlights the dynamic interaction between Chinese, Thai, and Sino-Thai identity construction, on the one hand, and the mutual production of domestic and international politics, on the other. It questions how nationalism and cosmopolitanism are formulated by arguing against the popular notion that a diaspora is a cosmopolitan community situated in a foreign nation. Diasporic public spheres are critically examined to show how Sino-Thai identity is produced in relation first to neo-nationalism in Thailand and China, and second in specific contexts within Thailand that call into question essential notions of Thai, Chinese, and overseas Chinese identity. Diasporas thus both construct and deconstruct the seemingly opposing forces of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The article uses the ethnographic approach of anthropological constructivism to build on sociological constructivism's focus on national identity, norms, and formal institutions. Rather than looking to culture as a substance, the article highlights how culture takes shape in context-sensitive relations between identity and difference. This ethnographic approach encourages one to look in different places for world politics, shifting away from state actors to transnational nonstate actors, from geopolitics and international political economy to economic culture, and from law and institutions as the foundations of international society to the less formal organizations of the diasporic public sphere. Diaspora thus not only adds new data to arguments about global/local relations—it helps one question the structures of world politics that look to the opposition between cosmopolitanism and nationalism.

Studies of the effects of interest groups on congressional roll-call voting typically view party and ideology as competing factors and rely on a factoral model of interests or a sectoral model including only interest groups with a direct stake in the vote. We depart from that strategy in several ways. We define interest groups at the level of Standard Industrial Classification two-digit codes and observe the universe of interests. For 1979–90, we use measures of geographically and nongeographically based economic interests to estimate the representative's party and ideology. We also consider the factor endowments of individuals within a district to examine their impact on floor votes. We then investigate the influence of these interests on members' party affiliation and ideology, as well as a pool of five floor votes on foreign trade, using instrumental variables for party and ideology. Economic interests account for a substantial portion of the variance in all cases, and models that also include other explanatory variables are highly accurate in estimating floor votes.

What explains the changes in International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality? I argue that IMF conditionality agreements are influenced by supplementary financiers. The IMF regularly relies on external financing to supplement its loans to countries facing payments imbalances. As a result, these supplementary financiers are able to exercise leverage over the IMF and the design of its conditionality programs. I consider the influence of one type of supplementary financier, private financial institutions, on IMF conditionality. “Conclusions are supported by a data set of 249 conditionality arrangements, coded according to their terms, and two case studies.”

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is an important element of the global economy and a central component of economic development strategies of both developed and developing countries. Numerous scholars theorize that the economic benefits of attracting multinational corporations come at tremendous political costs, arguing that democratic political systems attract lower levels of international investment than their authoritarian counterparts. Using both cross-sectional and time-series cross-sectional tests of the determinants of FDI for more than 100 countries, I generate results that are inconsistent with these dire predictions. Democratic political systems attract higher levels of FDI inflows both across countries and within countries over time. Democratic countries are predicted to attract as much as 70 percent more FDI than their authoritarian counterparts. In a final empirical test, I examine how democratic institutions affect country credibility by empirically analyzing the link between democracy and sovereign debt risk for about eighty countries from 1980 to 1998. These empirical tests challenge the conventional wisdom on the preferences of multinationals for authoritarian regimes.

Despite widespread recognition that aggregated summary statistics on international conflict and cooperation miss most of the complex interactions among nations, the vast majority of scholars continue to employ annual, quarterly, or (occasionally) monthly observations. Daily events data, coded from some of the huge volume of news stories produced by journalists, have not been used much for the past two decades. We offer some reason to change this practice, which we feel should lead to considerably increased use of these data. We address advances in event categorization schemes and software programs that automatically produce data by “reading” news stories without human coders. We design a method that makes it feasible, for the first time, to evaluate these programs when they are applied in areas with the particular characteristics of international conflict and cooperation data, namely event categories with highly unequal prevalences, and where rare events (such as highly conflictual actions) are of special interest. We use this rare events design to evaluate one existing program, and find it to be as good as trained human coders, but obviously far less expensive to use. For large-scale data collections, the program dominates human coding. Our new evaluative method should be of use in international relations, as well as more generally in the field of computational linguistics, for evaluating other automated information extraction tools. We believe that the data created by programs similar to the one we evaluated should see dramatically increased use in international relations research. To facilitate this process, we are releasing with this article data on 3.7 million international events, covering the entire world for the past decade.

Why do policymakers consistently employ economic sanctions even though scholars consider them an ineffective tool of statecraft? Game-theoretic models of economic coercion suggest the success rate may be understated because of selection effects. When the targeted country prefers conceding to incurring the cost of sanctions, it has an incentive to acquiesce before the imposition of sanctions. The bulk of successful coercion episodes should therefore end with sanctions threatened but not imposed. This contradicts the recent literature on sanctions, which assumes that sanctions rarely, if ever, work at generating significant concessions from the targeted country and are imposed for domestic or symbolic political reasons. If the game-theoretic argument is correct, the crucial cases to study are those in which coercion is threatened but not implemented. A statistical analysis of data on sanctions in pursuit of economic or regulatory goals strongly supports the gametheoretic argument. These results suggest that the significance of economic coercion has been undervalued in the study of statecraft and international relations more generally.