Studies explaining the end of the cold war and change in Soviet foreign policy tend to emphasize the role of the international system: decision makers “learned lessons” about the international system, and this learning brought about Soviet accommodationist policies. Such systemic and cognitive learning approaches tend, however, to mask the political and highly contingent nature of the policy changes. To understand these changes, one must explore how certain ideas got placed on the political agenda and how others were forced off.

This essay stresses the role of ideas about both the foreign and the domestic scene, as well as the role of a network of specialists that helped put these ideas on the national agenda. Ideas alone cannot explain any one outcome. They must be understood in terms of the political process by which they are selected. Ideas are more likely to be implemented and epistemic communities are more likely to be influential under three conditions: (1) access to the leadership, (2) salience of the ideas to the leadership, and (3) the ability of the leadership to control the political agenda.

One critical example of great change in foreign policy was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. This study examines the interplay of ideas and politics over time and explains how the decision to withdraw was implemented and why it occurred when it did. It focuses on (1) the mobilization of an epistemic community before Gorbachev came to power, (2) massive personnel changes within Soviet institutions in the 1980s, and (3) the empowerment of the epistemic community once Gorbachev had consolidated his power.

One of the concerns of international political economy in the past several years has been to theorize about the conditions conducive to the development of international cooperation and institutionalization. This article explores the usefulness of economic theories of dynamic contracting, which are essentially functionalist in nature, to understand international financial innovation in the 1920s. It interprets the founding of the Bank for International Settlements as an important effort to overcome the problems of contract enforcement and information asymmetries in international lending that had contributed to capital market inefficiencies as the 1920s drew to a close. Dynamic contracting theories suggest reasons why borrowers and lenders have a strong interest in developing cooperative international institutions that help establish a borrower's credibility. This approach is supplemented with a multilateral bargaining model between debtor, private lenders, and creditor governments to explain international financial innovation during the interwar years. The evidence suggests that the BIS was created primarily to enhance Germany's incentives to repay its debts and that it was part of a deal between private creditors and creditor governments to reduce and commercialize German reparations. By looking not only at interstate bargaining but also at public'private bargaining, it is possible to understand the paradox of cooperative international institutional development in a period otherwise marked by conflict.

The conditions under which states will cooperate to impose economic sanctions are of both theoretical and practical interest. Generally, when sanctions are used, one state takes the lead in organizing and imposing them. Other states have incentives to free ride on the “leading sender's” efforts. To gain cooperation, the leading sender uses tactical issue-linkage in the form of either threats or side payments. The success of cooperation depends on the credibility of these issue-linkages. The use of high-cost sanctions and international institutions raises the potential for high audience costs if the leading sender reneges. These policies thus indicate credible commitments. Data on ninety-nine cases of post-1945 economic sanctions show that costly measures coincide with high levels of international cooperation.

Two sets of Third World nations can shed light on the politics of economic transformation in Eastern Europe. First, there are nations that pursued particularly vigorous reforms in the 1980s. They shared three key political features: popular consensus that basic reforms were imperative; antireform groups largely in disarray or suppressed; and substantial executive autonomy in economic management. The first of these features is clearly present in Eastern Europe; the second is questionable; and the third is present but precarious and probably temporary. Second and also relevant to Eastern Europe is the growing group of Third World nations seeking to consolidate political openings simultaneously with major economic reforms. Economic and political liberalization conflict with, yet are crucial for, each other. Proposals that they be sequenced are unrealistic. In Eastern Europe as in the Third World, a crucial dilemma is reconciling public demands for access to decision making with sufficient executive autonomy for coherent economic management.

This article focuses on the legacies of the authoritarian regimes of South America for the contemporary consolidation of democracy. In particular, it considers their lasting effects on the region's informal networks and formal institutions of political representation. It questions several assumptions made by the literature on regime transition and democratic consolidation in South America about political culture, institutional reform, and electoral realignment: taken together, these assumptions are misleading about how much and what kind of political change has occurred in Latin America as a result of authoritarian rule. To understand how the challenges of democratic consolidation have been shaped, the article proposes instead to examine how the economic policies and political strategies pursued by military regimes preserved, altered, or destroyed the clientelistic and corporatist networks of mediation between state and society prevailing at the onset of authoritarianism, as well as those constructed upon the representative base of programmatic political parties.