This study provides a new explanation of Europe's transition from feudal anarchy a thousand years ago to peace, prosperity and democracy in the 20th century. I argue that Europe's long transition out of feudal anarchy was the consequence of a series of conflicts and settlements caused by a single problem. Actors repeatedly reached the point where they recognized that competitions in raising relative power were making everyone worse off. To stop the competitions, they agreed to divide the assets over which they were competing according to terms that were independent of relative power. They formed contracts whose terms were tied to anchors in the world that did not move. This device reduced each actor's incentive to invest resources in increasing his relative power, for such investments would not shift the contract terms in his favor. The anchor contracts stopped the competitions in raising relative power. Actors also needed a way to enforce the anchor contracts that did not rely primarily on power based enforcement tools. For such tools could reignite the competitions in raising relative power. Hence actors developed anchor based enforcement tools. Reliance on anchor contracts created a vulnerability to disputes, even when there were no power shifts or uncertainties about relative power. The single most important cause of disputes was legal incompatibility problems. At the times and places where actors had a high capacity for legal incompatibility management (LIM), the disputes were resolved smoothly and development proceeded. At the times and places where actors had low LIM capacity, by contrast, the disputes became intractable and development was hindered. In the long run, Europe oscillated between these two worlds. Where actors had high LIM capacity, they lived in a world of law that enjoyed political stability, good economic governance, social capital formation and long-run development. Where actors had low LIM capacity, they lived in a world of power that suffered political instability, misgovernance, social capital depletion and underdevelopment. These oscillations occurred at both the domestic and international levels. A single causal model explains the evidence on both levels. The model thus provides a unified explanation of Europe's development. The theory developed in this study, which I call Contractual Realism, differs from the three main paradigms in the literature on conflict, cooperation and long-run transformation. Contractual Realism identifies a single factor that drives the three variables that are thought to be independent drivers in the main paradigms: power politics, institutional design, and social identity roles. In this sense Contractual Realism resolves the debates between the three conventional paradigms.

Why do states pay costs to engage in international competitions over issues of little immediate material or strategic interest to them? This dissertation argues that a substantial portion of state behavior, commonly attributed to security concerns, is actually driven by competitions for prestige. States often acquire territory or weapons or exert their independence in international affairs not out of concern for their security but out of a desire to persuade other states that they should be listened to. The dynamics of such prestige competitions are not well understood. Among my findings, I discover that states which have recently experienced a publicly humiliating event will be more likely to pay costs to seek prestige because they want to minimize decline in influence that might result from their demotion in the eyes of others. Also, if the humiliated state is near enough in influence to the dominant state in the system or region, the dominant state will match the humiliated state's prestige investment, generating an international race for prestige. These dynamics are illustrated within the Scramble for Africa and the nuclear arms race for parity during the Cold War.

Statesmen are quick to declare that they will not negotiate with terrorists. Yet, the empirical record demonstrates that, despite statements to the contrary, many states do eventually negotiate with their terrorist challengers. My dissertation examines the circumstances under which states employ strategic negotiations with terrorist groups to resolve violent conflict. I argue that only when faced with a credible and capable adversary and afforded relative freedom of action domestically will states negotiate with terrorists. To test this theory, I use a multi-method approach that incorporates a cross-national study of all known strategic negotiations from 1968-2006 and three within-case studies (Israel, Northern Ireland, and the Philippines). Initial results suggest that negotiations are employed in about 13% of terrorist campaigns, certain types of groups are privileged, and negotiations only occur when statesmen can overcome domestic obstacles, namely public and veto player opposition. This study seeks to make definitive contributions to both science and society: Its findings will advance the literatures on conflict processes and policymaking, while informing the policy debate on effective counterterrorism strategies, an especially timely contribution given ongoing efforts to negotiate with terrorist groups in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Israel.

How do leaders navigate foreign policy making when their preferences are at odds with their publics? The international relations and political behavior literatures present two ostensibly incompatible observations about democracies and foreign policy; the former arguing that democratic leaders are constrained in foreign policy making and the later arguing that public opinion on foreign policy is often missing its teeth. This raises several important questions, when do democratic leaders face constraint, what does constraint look like when they do, are leaders held accountable, and if so, what does accountability look like when they are?

To answer these questions, I argue that just as leaders tie their hands and create prospective audience costs, they can also act strategically to pursue their objectives by acting to loosen domestic constraints to broaden the range of acceptable policies, those which are not expected to result in ex post audience costs. Leaders are highly aware of and concerned with the potential for domestic backlash and are able to reduce and loosen seemingly prospective audience costs. This thesis integrates the audience cost and political behavior arguments to cohesively demonstrate how political leaders deal with situations in which their foreign policy objectives, given international challenges and possibilities, are at odds with domestic political preferences.

I test my theory through process tracing of seven cases of democratic countries that joined the Iraq War despite opposed publics. First I show that political opportunities and constraints embody more than just public opinion and more than just the structure of political institutions. They are multifaceted and nuanced and also include historical normative factors and the particular political context. Second, I show that political leaders are just that, they have the capacity to lead and expand (as well as contract) the constraints under which they operate. My findings suggest that the multifaceted nature of constraint allows leaders the opportunity to emphasize the more favorable factors and in some cases use those favorable factors to reduce the impact of the less favorable factors of constraint resulting in a more nuanced understanding of accountability as well.

Studies of crisis bargaining have traditionally focused on the strategies for signaling resolve to other states, even when incorporating a domestic audience into the analysis. In this dissertation, I examine crisis bargaining strategies meant primarily to send signals to the domestic audience. Using game theoretic models, historical case studies and a survey experiment, I show that governments can successfully bait adversaries into minor incidents and deceive the public into authorizing war even though minor incidents can also be highly informative about an adversary's intentions under certain conditions. I also show that public opinion can lead governments to forgo preemptive strikes and preventive war, and that democracy can therefore reduce public welfare in some circumstances. I discuss the implications of these findings for the conventional wisdom on crisis behavior and on the value of democracy in foreign policy.

Since 1945 the United States has not used nuclear weapons to attack other states, yet it has used nuclear coercion more actively than any state. Why did the U.S. use nuclear coercion at all against weak states or for non-vital national interests when the U.S. had superior conventional forces? What would have induced U.S. leaders to employ nuclear coercion? Nuclear deterrence theory and nuclear taboo theory cannot adequately explain why, under similar security and domestic environments, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were more willing to use nuclear coercion whereas other leaders like Lyndon Johnson overall abstained from using nuclear threats. I argue that while U.S. leaders’ learning of the overly destructive damages of military nuclear use raised the threshold of using nuclear weapons to attack, the lack of learning or biased learning of the repercussions of coercive nuclear use, especially nuclear proliferation induced by U.S. nuclear threats, allowed many leaders to retain their belief in the coercive power of nuclear weapons. Therefore, they considered and even used nuclear coercion for non-vital matters. Based on the theoretical concepts of nuclear learning and using a historical analysis, my dissertation finds a causal mechanism of nuclear learning that could explain what promoted or hindered learning of the technical and political reality of nuclear weapons and led them to the counterproductive use of nuclear coercion.

When do leaders fear the domestic repercussions of revolutions abroad, and how does the prospect of such revolutionary waves affect international affairs? I argue that the fear of contagion is not primarily derived from the infecting agent - whether the revolutionary state serves as a model or acts as a platform. Instead, the fear of contagion is largely driven by the characteristics of the host, namely the presence of significant preexisting opposition groups in the host of the same character as the revolution. And I argue that when leaders fear revolution spreading, it will have a discernible effect on patterns of international cooperation and conflict: they will be hostile towards the revolutionary state and they will align with other states that face the same threat, sometimes in contrast to geopolitical pressures. I examine the reaction to the democratic revolutions under the ancien r�gime (the American Revolution and the Dutch Patriot Revolt), the wave of liberal revolutions in Europe in 1820-1, and the Iranian Islamist Revolution in the Middle East. The findings not only address the international effects of revolutions, but also the larger issues of when, why, and to what extent ideological differences between states affect international relations and how domestic instability interacts with international politics.

This study assesses the causes and effects of partisan great power interventions in the elections of other countries. Such interventions have been a quite common phenomenon extending back to the beginnings of competitive elections and even including the 1796 U.S. Presidential elections (the source of this study's title). Since World War II, such interventions have become quite common: a dataset I constructed of U.S. and Soviet/Russian electoral interventions between 1946 and 2000 finds that there were such interventions in approximately one of every nine competitive national level executive elections during this period. In today's world, in which competitive national level elections are a significant feature of domestic politics in more than half of the states in the international system, partisan electoral interventions will likely become an even more prominent tool in the great powers' arsenal. Nevertheless, there has been scant scholarly research on this topic.

As for the causes of electoral interventions this study argues that electoral interventions usually occur when two concurrent conditions exist. The first is the consent and cooperation of a significant domestic actor within the target with a proposed intervention by the great power. The second is that the intervener sees its interests as being endangered by the very different and inflexible preferences held by another significant candidate/party within the target. As for the electoral consequences of electoral intervention, this study argues that they usually significantly increase the electoral chances of the aided candidate and that overt interventions are more effective than covert interventions. Likewise, electoral interventions will be less helpful to the aided party/candidate in founding elections than in later elections.

These hypotheses are tested using multiple methods. The first argument concerning the causes of electoral interventions is tested largely through the in-depth analysis of four case studies (utilizing archival documents) in which such interventions were done or seriously considered by a great power chosen out of the abovenoted dataset of electoral interventions. The second set of hypotheses, about the electoral consequences of such interventions, is tested in two different ways. The first is a large N statistical study utilizing a new dataset of all U.S. and USSR/Russian partisan electoral interventions between 1946 and 2000 constructed by the author. The second is a single election level examination of the electoral consequences of such interventions (utilizing exit polls etc.) in four select intervention cases. Utilizing these methods, this study finds strong evidence in support of the arguments presented here as to both questions.

The surface of the Earth is divided into over 200 internationally recognized states, but

only a fraction of these are what could be called nation-states—that is, states whose

people generally agree that they are members of the same national group first and

foremost, and therefore consider themselves related to one another on an ideological

level. What binds people from different backgrounds into a cohesive nation that is

capable of effective collective action? In this dissertation, I develop two computational

models—the Territorial Resources Model and the Ideological Alliances Model—and use

them to test conflict-based theories of nation-state formation. I find these models generate

complex patterns of national consolidation similar to the historical record in both the

ancient and early Modern eras, suggesting that intergroup conflict is a good candidate

explanation for variance in modern state formation outcomes.

This dissertation asks: when do international courts promote cooperation among countries? I argue that international courts can successfully restore economic relations between disputing governments but their impact depends on domestic politics. When confronted with an adverse legal ruling from an international court, a defendant government must determine whether and when to comply. Governments are constrained by domestic institutional divisions and partisan conflict: "veto points." Countries with substantial divisions are less likely to comply because more political actors must coordinate to implement the ruling. As partisan divisions grow, government leaders are constrained by their domestic opposition and compliance becomes more difficult. The design of the international court contributes to this effect. Courts vary in their ability to sanction violations. When the court is designed to be flexible, imposing low costs for noncompliance, the impact of domestic politics is particularly pronounced.

These arguments are tested with international trade disputes at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The first empirical chapter uses WTO disputes to examine the impact of domestic politics in the defendant country on compliance with adverse legal rulings. Adverse rulings require a defendant government to remove trade barriers so this chapter assesses compliance using trade flows. I build a novel data set on compliance using the method of synthetic case control and product-level time-series trade data. I infer the defendant complied if trade flows increased after the dispute, relative to estimated levels that would have occurred in the absence of the ruling. The estimates show compliance problems are both widespread and systematically linked to domestic politics. Domestic constraints---measured in terms of veto points---hinder compliance.

The second empirical chapter tests my main argument on the European Court of Justice. I show that domestic political constraints in European Union countries also impact compliance with adverse legal rulings. I focus on infringement disputes over trade-related issues, instances in which European member states imposed illegal barriers to intra-European commerce. This chapter uses a hierarchical model that captures the multi-level structure of the data. By examining intra-European trade over time, I show that adverse rulings lead to a modest increase in trade but this tendency is conditional on domestic politics. Defendant governments with many veto players appear impervious to adverse rulings. The findings indicate that ECJ rulings can prompt governments to open their markets to more European commerce, but that domestic politics can obstruct this process.

The third empirical chapter evaluates the effectiveness of international dispute settlement along a different dimension: the time to resolve a dispute. Because prolonged lawsuits can buy defendants time to ``cheat'' at the expense of plaintiffs and other members of the international institution, they can have deleterious effects on cooperation that are similar to noncompliance. This chapter demonstrates that WTO and ECJ lawsuits against defendants with many domestic veto points lasted longer on average, before the countries acquiesced. Moreover, the ill effect of veto players on dispute resolution has been stronger in the WTO than the ECJ. I argue that the design of the international court mediates the impact of domestic veto players on dispute duration.

In sum, my dissertation shows that international courts can successfully promote economic cooperation between countries but their effectiveness hinges on domestic politics.