Governments have increasingly adopted laws restricting the activities of international non-governmental organizations INGOs within their borders. Such laws are often intended to curb the ability of critical INGOs to discover and communicate government failures and abuses to domestic and international audiences. They can also have the unintended effect of reducing the presence and activities of INGOs working on health issues, and depriving local health workers and organizations of access to resources, knowledge and other forms of support. This study assesses whether legislative restrictions on INGOs are associated with fewer health INGOs in a wide range of countries and with the ability of those countries to mitigate disability-adjusted life years lost because of twenty-one disease categories between 1993 and 2017. The findings indicate that restrictive legislation hampered efforts by civil society to lighten the global burden of disease and had adverse side effects on the health of citizens worldwide.

Is there a ‘democratic deficit’ in global politics? If so, which changes in institutions and practices can mitigate it? Empirically oriented scholars who ask such questions often use as a yardstick the normative principle that people significantly affected by a decision should be able to take part in reaching that decision. This ‘all-affected principle’ is also endorsed by prominent political theorists. However, its most logically consistent interpretation seems so demanding that it casts doubt on the principle’s usefulness to guide the assessment of real-world situations, since it appears to require that virtually everyone in the world should have a say on any proposal or any proposal for proposals. The argument presented here intends to rescue the principle as a tool for empirical assessments of real-world situations by stressing its role in comparative judgments and especially by showing that its implications are not too expansive and/or indeterminate, once we take into account that certain types of prior decisions significantly restrict the agenda of other decisions in a systematic way. The theoretical guidance for empirical research offered in the first part of the article is then illustrated with an application to global child labor policies.

Ratifying core conventions adopted by the International Labor Organization (ILO) creates legal obligations to improve labor standards in the domestic economy, notably with regard to union rights, minimum age and discrimination in employment, and forced labor. Why and when do states choose to ratify them? Two influential theoretical approaches lead to the expectation that states are influenced by the ratification behavior of other states. Drawing on rationalist institutionalism, the authors expect states to use institutions such as the ILO to improve or consolidate their preferred standards domestically while reducing the risk of suffering competitive disadvantages in world markets. In this view, ILO conventions are devices for the prevention and mitigation of regulatory races to the bottom among trade rivals. Drawing on sociological institutionalism, they expect states to ratify ILO conventions if doing so conforms to a norm of appropriate behavior that is prevalent in a state's peer groups. This article develops observable implications of these hypotheses and tests them by applying spatial regression models to seven core ILO conventions and 187 countries between 1948 and 2009. The analysis yields strong evidence in support of both hypotheses.

Some member-states of the European Union (EU) want a supranational foreign and security policy, while other member-states oppose any significant limitation of national sovereignty in this domain. What explains this variation? Answering this question could help us to better understand not only the trajectory of European unification, but also the conditions and prospects of consensual political integration in other regional contexts and territorial scales. The main research traditions in international relations theory suggest different explanations. I examine the roles of relative power capabilities, foreign policy interests, Europeanized identities, and domestic multilevel governance in determining the preferences of the fifteen EU member governments concerning the institutional depth of their foreign and security policy cooperation. I find that power capabilities and collective identities have a significant influence, but the effect of ideas about the nature and locus of sovereignty, as reflected in the domestic constitution of each country, is particularly remarkable.A previous version of this article was presented at the 4th ECPR Pan-European International Relations Conference, Canterbury, 8–10 September 2001. For their valuable comments, I would like to thank Filippo Andreatta, Daniele Archibugi, Simone Borra, Nicola Dunbar, Fabio Franchino, Alkuin Kölliker, Leonardo Morlino, Angelo Panebianco, Eiko Thielemann, Ben Tonra, the editors of IO, and three anonymous reviewers. I am responsible for any mistakes.

This article considers the issue of public accountability of transnational corporations (TNCs) in the light of the experiences of the past 30 years. It discusses the problem of accountability of corporations in general and examines the accountability gaps that are particularly severe as a result of the global reach and power of TNCs, notably those related to the collusion between government officials and TNCs, to regulatory competition, to state weakness and breakdown, and to political subversion. Then existing attempts to close those gaps are assessed, including intergovernmental cooperation, business ‘self-regulation’ and initiatives that involve nongovernmental organizations and supranational agencies in defining standards of conduct for companies and monitoring their compliance.

Gli studiosi di politica internazionale evocano spesso l'immagine dello «Stato di natura» per descrivere sinteticamente i rapporti tra gli Statio Per i pili pessimisti, descrivere i rapporti internazionali in questo modo equivale a postulare uno stato di guerra permanente, attuale o potenziale. Thomas Hobbes, che pose l'idea dello stato di natura tra le basi della sua dottrina dell' autorita politica, riconosceva che esso probabilmente non era altro che un'utile costruzione euristica se riferito ai rapporti tra singoli individui, rna ne difendeva il carattere di descrizione realistica se applicato ai rapporti tra i sovrani del suo tempo e non solo. Per Hobbes, anche se «non vi e mai stata un'epoca nella quale ogni uomo era in guerra contro un altro uomo», i re e gli altri sovrani, a causa della loro indipendenza, permanentemente «si trovano nella posizione di gladiatori, con Ie armi puntate, con i loro forti, Ie loro guarnigioni ed i loro fucili alle frontiere: la quale e una posizione guerresca» (Hobbes [1651] 1911, XIII, 103).