Debates over how ideas matter in international relations have come to occupy a key place in the field. Through a reexamination of the thinking of Hans Morgenthau, this article seeks to recover a tradition of classical realism that stressed the role of ideas in both the construction of action and in political and ethical judgment. Locating Morgenthau's understanding of politics against the background of the oppositional “concept of the political” developed by the controversial jurist Carl Schmitt shows how Morgenthau's realism attempts to recognize the centrality of power in politics without reducing politics to violence, and to preserve an open and critical sphere of public political debate. This understanding of Morgenthau's realism challenges many portrayals of his place in the evolution of international relations, and of the foundations of realist thought. However, it is also of direct relevance to current analyses of collective identity formation, linking to—and yet providing fundamental challenges for—both realist and constructivist theories.For helpful and insightful comments on this article in its wide variety of previous incarnations, I would like to thank Michael Barnett, James Der Derian, Randall Germain, Alexandra Gheciu, Stefano Guzzini, Jef Huysmans, Oliver Jutersönke, Jennifer Mitzen, Vibeke Schou Pedersen, and especially Rita Abrahamsen and Richard Wyn Jones. Previous drafts were presented at the 2002 meetings of the British International Studies Association, and at the Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. My thanks also to the participants at those sessions.

In recent years there have been numerous calls for making the operations of international organizations more “transparent.” One element in these demands involves the idea that international negotiations should be open to the same level of outside scrutiny that is presumed to prevail with bargaining in domestic contexts. While transparency of this sort may have clear benefits by facilitating attempts to hold officials accountable, scholars have made less effort to consider whether making international bargaining more public might also have detrimental effects. I develop a game-theoretic model that provides four hypotheses about the relative benefits of open-door versus closed-door bargaining, and about the preferences of different actors with regard to this type of transparency. This model, which can be applied to international and domestic contexts, helps extend positive theories about the design of institutions while also providing insights for the normative question of when transparency is desirable. I show that the hypotheses developed are supported both by historical evidence from eighteenth-century disputes about publicity in national parliaments, and by evidence from the more recent dispute about making European Council of Ministers deliberations public.I would like to thank Simon Hix, Bernard Manin, Lisa Martin, John Odell, Andrea Prat, Ken Scheve, Karen Smith, Andrew Walter, Peter Wilson, seminar participants at the LSE and at Sciences-Po in Paris, as well as two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.

How have market and state shaped the long-term coevolution of economic performance and social protection during the nineteenth century and post–World War II waves of globalization associated with British laissez-faire liberalism and U.S.-embedded liberalism? Under the impulse of seemingly ever-intensifying globalization, this question is emerging at the core of a novel body of political economy research that seeks to compare the two waves of globalization to draw useful lessons from the past. This research also reflects the concerns recently voiced by neoliberals and neointerventionists about the long-term stability and viability of post–World War II embedded liberalism. Satisfactory investigations of how market and state shape the long-term coevolution of economic performance and social protection in the two regimes remain lacking. Cointegration analyses of the two hegemonic powers that shaped the evolution of the two regimes—nineteenth-century Great Britain and post–World War II United States—demonstrate that the complementarity of market and state in embedded liberalism is associated with better long-term economic performance and social protection.I thank the following people for their help and support in developing this project: Katarina Juselius, Soren Johansen, Mike Artis, Ilijan Georgiev, Suzanne Perry, Ed Mansfield, Dennis Quinn, Lars-Erik Cederman, Ron Jepperson, Mark Kesselman, Luis Moreno, Martin Rhodes, Benedicta Marzinotto, Ron King, David Clinton, and the participants in the Nordic Project funded by the Danish Social Sciences Research Council. Two anonymous reviewers provided valuable suggestions. A Jean Monnet Fellowship from the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute provided financial support for the project. Any errors are my own.

What is the impact of economic insecurity on the development of institutions of social insurance? Existing studies have examined this question by exploring the impact of various measures of economic volatility on aggregate government expenditures or revenues. These aggregate data are, however, an imperfect proxy of the character of institutions of social protection. To overcome the limitations of earlier studies, this article explores the conditions under which economic insecurity leads to the extension of the level of social insurance coverage. I argue that economic insecurity sharpens a sectoral cleavage between coalitions in “high-risk” and “low-risk” sectors. Workers (and some employers) in high-risk sectors will favor the introduction of social insurance institutions characterized by broad levels of coverage and a high redistribution of costs across occupations. In contrast, a cross-class alliance in low-risk sectors will oppose proposals aiming at the introduction of redistributive social policies, fearing that these policies will turn them into subsidizers of high-risk industries. A redistributive social insurance policy will be introduced only if the “high-risk” coalition is larger. The article tests both the micro- and macro-level implications of this theory, by examining the development of unemployment insurance policies in interwar Europe.I gratefully acknowledge comments from Carles Boix, Peter Gourevitch, and two anonymous referees. Many thanks to Stefano Bartolini, John Fitzgerald, and Michael Tomz for sharing data with me.

The “new” trade theory and standard trade theory make different predictions about the composition and distribution of trade flows. Empirical evidence suggests that an increasing share of international trade consists of differentiated products, a consequence of increasing returns to scale. Nonetheless, the existing political science literature typically assumes that the conditions of standard theory hold. As such, the literature ignores the dynamic-inconsistency problem that imperfect markets can create. In doing so, it also ignores the fact that imperfect markets can shift the political prerequisites of open international markets. In this article we examine these shifts. We argue that alliances can support an optimal level of trade when scale economies rather than differences in relative factor endowments motivate it. Our empirical results support this argument, indicating that alliances exert a stronger influence on trade in goods produced under conditions of increasing rather than constant returns to scale.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston; the 2002 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New Orleans; and seminars at the University of Chicago (PIPES), the University of Colorado, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. For helpful comments and suggestions, we are grateful to participants in these seminars and to Regina Baker, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, William Clark, Benjamin Cohen, Christina Davis, Eric Fisher, Avery Goldstein, Stephen Kobrin, Lisa Martin, Patrick McDonald, Helen Milner, Robert Powell, Dan Reiter, Anne Sartori, Branislav Slantchev, and Beth Yarbrough. We are also grateful to Regina Baker and Patrick McDonald for research assistance.

When a statistical equation incorporates a multiplicative term in an attempt to model interaction effects, the statistical significance of the lower-order coefficients is largely useless for the typical purposes of hypothesis testing. This fact remains largely unappreciated in political science, however. This brief article explains this point, provides examples, and offers some suggestions for more meaningful interpretation.I am grateful to Tim McDaniel, Anne Sartori, and Beth Simmons for comments on a previous draft.