This article argues that to gain a more complete understanding of how lesbian families experience parenthood outside of the heterosexual context, scholars must consider how co-parents negotiate a parental identity, rather than presuming that women parents want to mother. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 17 women in a state that denies them parental legal rights, this article asks how a nonb…
Gender representations reproduce and legitimate gender systems. To examine this aspect of the gendered social order, we analyze the representation of males and females in the titles and central characters of 5,618 childrens books published throughout the twentieth century in the United States. Compared to females, males are represented nearly twice as often in titles and 1.6 times as often as …
Feminist scholars have critically analyzed the effects of sex segregation in numerous social institutions, yet sex-segregated sport often remains unchallenged. Even critics of sex-segregated sport have tended to accept the merits of women-only teams at face value. In this article, we revisit this issue by examining the underlying assumptions supporting womens and girls teams and explore how t…
In this article I report findings from interviews with 26 openly gay male athletes who came out between 2008 and 2010. I compare their experiences to those of 26 gay male athletes who came out between 2000 and 2002. The athletes in the 2010 cohort have had better experiences after coming out than those in the earlier cohort, experiencing less heterosexism and maintaining better support among th…
The results of deliberations in multilateral fora are often considered ineffective. Decision making in the European Union (EU) and in particular its key intergovernmental body, the European Council, poses no exception. Especially in the domain of EU foreign and security affairs, the unanimity requirement governing this institution allegedly allows nationalist governments to torpedo any attempt …
The creation of an International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute war crimes poses a real puzzle. Why was it created, and more importantly, why do states agree to join this institution? The ICC represents a serious intrusion into a traditional arena of state sovereignty: the right to administer justice to one's one nationals. Yet more than one hundred states have joined. Social scientists are …
International institutions often moderate the legal decisions they render. World Trade Organization (WTO) panels do this by exercising judicial economy. This practice, which is evident in 41 percent of all rulings, involves the decision not to rule on some of the litigants' arguments. The constraint is that it can be appealed. We argue that panels exercise judicial economy when the wider member…
This article explores the strategic problems that arise when a state seeks to use military force to compel changes in another state's policies. Although the costs associated with military action mean that there generally exist compromises that both sides prefer to conflict, bargaining may fail if such deals are not enforceable in the face of temptations to renege on policy concessions. This stu…
If governments choose economic policies that often run counter to their public commitments, are those commitments meaningless? We argue that government proclamations can be critical in signaling economic policy intentions. We focus on the realm of exchange rate policy, in which countries frequently implement an exchange rate regime that differs from the officially declared regime. We argue that…
Previous studies that have explored the effects of economic liberalization on civil war have employed aggregate measures of openness and have failed to account for potential endogeneity bias. In this research note, we suggest two improvements to the study of the relationship between liberalization and civil war. First, emphasizing that it is processes that systematically create new economic win…
In typical crisis bargaining models, strong actors must convince the opponent that they are not bluffing and the only way to do so is through costly signaling. However, in a war, strong actors can benefit from tactical surprise when their opponent mistakenly believes that they are weak. This creates contradictory incentives during the pre-war crisis: actors want to persuade the opponent of thei…
Existing research on foreign direct investment (FDI) focuses on how politics influences the supply of FDI inflows. In this article I shift focus to the demand for FDI inflows within recipient countries by examining individual preferences for FDI. I argue that FDI preferences are largely a function of FDI's effects on income. FDI raises wages, especially those of skilled labor because foreign fi…
Theory and empirical evidence show that low inflation is a precondition for economic growth. Independent central banks and fixed exchange rates are institutional mechanisms that help keep inflation low by lending monetary policy credibility to governments. However, the two institutions are commonly analyzed as substitutes that tie the hands of inflation prone governments. Thus, the literature h…
Prevailing theories hold that U.S. public support for a war depends primarily on its degree of success, U.S. casualties, or conflict goals. Yet, research into the framing of foreign policy shows that public perceptions concerning each of these factors are often endogenous and malleable by elites. In this article, we argue that both elite rhetoric and the situation on the ground in the conflict …
This research note examines whether trade competition abets regulatory races in the environmental area. To analyze trade competition, we develop a new measure, structural equivalence, which assesses competitive threats that a country faces from other countries whose firms export the same products to the same destination countries. Employing this new measure, we analyze air pollution intensity (…
Cross-border cooperation among domestic regulators and public officials has become a defining feature of global governance. While a number of studies have tracked the emergence and institutionalization of such transgovernmental networks, less is known about their effect on domestic policy. This study explores this link for the important case of insider-trading regulation in original data for 11…
Inequalities may lead to injustice, and are recognized increasingly as contributing to a wide range of social problems. The English uplands are characterized by low population densities, few services and low household incomes compared with other rural areas, giving rise to the potential for injustice. We use a dataset combining social, economic and environmental variables to develop a new integ…
Why, after the outbreak of World War II in Eastern Europe, did the inhabitants of some communities erupt in violence against their Jewish neighbors? The authors hypothesize that the greater the degree of preexisting intercommunal polarization between Jews and the titular majority group, the more likely a pogrom. They test this proposition using an original data set of matched census and elector…
Theories of government approval usually assume that voters care about economic outcomes. This assumption frequently does not hold. Data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems demonstrate that although the economy is often the most important issue in an election, its place on the issue agenda varies across individuals and electoral contexts. The economy is more likely to dominate other …