International Political Science Review

The assassination of foreign leaders is rarely considered by scholars of international affairs. This article examines the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and the debates around the international tribunal formed to investigate it. It argues that the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is an instance of how issues of foreign policy intersect with the perennial themes of international organization and law. It pays particular attention to how the international norm against political assassinations remains a contested issue in international politics.

This study reviews the transformation of governing structures in Europe over two centuries and examines the structural impact of the European Union (EU) on Turkish politics and polity. The Ottoman elites reformed governing structures during the 19th century and transformed a multinational and multireligious empire into a nation-state with a modern administrative structure similar to European examples. Today the Turkish governing elites are faced with a European challenge on similar terms, but with crucial differences in dimensions and impact. The EU conditions for Turkish membership are of a revolutionary character in that they require fundamental changes in the governing structures of the republican regime. Although Turkey—EU relations are evaluated in terms of EU conditionality, Europeanization poses a tremendous challenge to the nation-state and requires a transformation of basic governing structures and mentalities.

This article provides an answer to the question of why government support for child care policies and programs in the United States remains weak, despite increasing levels of women’s labor market participation and a relatively strong women’s movement, but strong in France, a country that has had lower levels of women’s labor market participation as well as a much weaker women’s movement. While those differences can be explained in part by economic and political interests and institutional and broad cultural differences, a theoretically richer understanding emerges when one examines how the three kinds of ideas underpinning these policy choices — norms, frames, and programmatic ideas — helped shape policies that emerged within specific actor, institutional, and cultural contexts.

Comparative analysts argue that democracies spend less on military policies than authoritarian states, a claim that was applied to Brazilian electoral democracy by Hunter (1997). In fact, Brazil behaves as an outlier and military spending has continued to increase since 1995. Our explanation for this behavior relies on the idea of internal political governability risks faced by Brazilian presidents.They are continually threatened by leftist groups that have fragile commitments to liberal democracies and they rely on the military to strategically protect them.

Structural adjustment is commonly prescribed as a condition for receiving loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but the effects of structural adjustment and conditionality are controversial. While much research has been devoted to examining the economic effects of conditional lending, far fewer studies have looked at the political consequences. How do conditional lending agreements affect democracy? Does the number of required reforms or the type of reform play a role? Neoliberal theory suggests that improved economic conditions will result from structural adjustment, and over time this should lead to higher levels of democracy. Conversely, democratic practices may decline in the presence of conditionality as the government reduces civil liberties in an attempt to quell the social unrest that results from structural adjustment. Using a sample of Latin American countries from 1998 to 2003, this article analyzes the effects of both the number and type of required conditions on democracy and finds that while the presence of an IMF loan itself does not affect democracy, loan with a high number of required reforms have a deleterious effect on democratic practices. Further, these effects are conditional upon the type of reform required in the loan. This suggests that IMF efforts to consider the political consequences of reforms when negotiating loans have not been entirely successful and that the number and type of conditional requirements should be carefully considered before their inclusion in a loan agreement.