Timothy James McKeown

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC · Department of Political Science

In what situations is the speech of foreign policy officials a reflection of speech expounding grand theories of International Relations? Using a linear support vector classification algorithm, we analyze all the published volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States as a single corpus, examining the use of five frames taken from a mix of acad...

How Western Soldiers Fight: Organizational Routines in Multinational Missions. By Cornelius Friesendorf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 304p. $99.99 cloth. - Volume 17 Issue 3 - Timothy J. McKeown

Academic discussions of the applicability of international relations theories to foreign policy have typically focused on whether specific theorists or writings can usefully be regarded as falling within the domain of realism, idealism, or some other general theory. We propose instead to investigate whether diplomatic practitioners can be classifie...

Academic discussions of the applicability of international relations theories to foreign policy have typically focused on whether specific theorists or writings can usefully be regarded as falling within the domain of realism, or idealism, or some other general theory. We propose instead to investigate whether diplomatic practitioners can be classi...

A review of Dale Copeland's _Economic Interdependence and War_ (2015), focusing on the use of case studies

This roughly 10-minute audio-only interview covers similarities and differences between the October, 1962 crisis involving Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba and the current crisis involving the North Korean nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programs.

Although Kenneth Waltz famously claimed that realist theory does not purport to describe the actual decision process of any single government, his followers have disagreed, and claim that foreign policy is in fact conducted by decision-makers who think and act in explicitly realist terms. This paper seeks to identify the historical role of realist...

This is the final pre-publication copy of this article. For the official publication copy, please go to the Taylor and Francis download page entry. Here is the abstract: A well-known approach to modeling international relations treats them as a two-level game played by national governments and international organizations, in which they negotiate w...

This link takes you to the official Taylor and Francis download page for an official copy of this article. For a pre-publication copy of the text, see the entry for "A different two-level game."

A well-known approach to modeling international relations treats them as a two-level game played by national governments and international organizations, in which they negotiate with one another while coping with internal constraints on their action posed by domestic politics or organizational governance. Officials in these organizations can play a...

Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era. ByLathamMichael E.. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 304 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.95. ISBN: Cloth 0-807-82533-6; paper 0-807-84844-1. - Volume 75 Issue 1 - Timothy J. McKeown

Although quantitative studies have identified relationships between the interests of powerful, wealthy states and the lending patterns of international financial institutions, they do not illuminate influence processes that give rise to these patterns. Three closely held internal assessments by the U.S. government of its influence over decisions in...

Svensson (199837. Svensson , P. 1998. ‘Strategic Trade Policy and Endogenous R&D Subsidies: An Empirical Study’. Kyklos,, 51(2): 259–75. View all references, Kyklos 51(2): 259–75) asked whether strategic trade theory or aspects of sectors' political influence accounted for OECD governments' research and development funding, but he did not consider...

When do we expect states to violate formal cease-fires and peace agreements? Does the spectre of retaliation prevent states from breaking their cease-fires and peace agree-ments? I argue that in an environment of uncertainty about intentions and resolve, states can use histories of retaliatory behavior to overcome informational challenges. Specific...

How presidents allocate their attention is the subject of much popular commentary and speculation, but little systematic scholarly research. I focus on an apparent case of presidential “micromanagement”—the practice within the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon White Houses of requiring presidential approval for small (often $5 to $10 million) foreign aid...

Studies of the effects of interest groups on congressional roll-call voting typically view party and ideology as competing factors and rely on a factoral model of interests or a sectoral model including only interest groups with a direct stake in the vote. We depart from that strategy in several ways. We define interest groups at the level of Stand...

Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sydney Verba's Designing Social Inquiry exploits the metaphor of researcher-as-statistician to develop guidelines for conducting social scientific research that are allegedly applicable to all empirical investigations. Their approach has sharp and often unflattering implications for case studies and similar researc...

We broaden the analysis of aid flows by investigating the effects of domestic and transnational electoral politics on Japanese overseas development assistance(ODA). We also consider measures of external financial balance and Japan's importance in the international trading system. We present a method for assessing shifts in Japanese ODA policy. We f...

Recent disclosures about the Cuban missile crisis suggest that organizational routines and plans did not significantly constrain U.S. government choices. Rather than constituting fixed barriers to innovation, routines and plans can be relatively plastic and subject to strategic alterations or misrepresentations. Although this can be partly understo...

Allison's (1971) argument about the importance of bureaucratic politics was supported by his use of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 as a “least likely case” for their impact. For the same reasons, the crisis is a least likely case for domestic politics affecting foreign policy. Recent disclosures about the U.S. side during the crisis suggest that...

At least since Alexis de Tocqueville's era, the only clearly articulated view of American foreign policy has been exceptionalism, which holds that Americans deprecate power politics and old-fashioned diplomacy, mistrust powerful standing armies and entangling peacetime commitments, make moralistic judgments about other people's domestic systems, an...

Most work on corporate Political Action Committees (PACs) accounts for their formation or activity level in terms of market concentration and collective action dilemmas. Subsidiary concerns include the effects of regulatory burden and the firm's internal organization. However, these cross-sectional designs yield little insight into the dynamics of...

It is often claimed that the post-World War II trading order has been relatively liberal, and much effort has been invested in explaining why it has not become more closed in the aftermath of Bretton Woods. Investigation of actual imports (as opposed to policy instruments designed to influence imports (reveals that the advanced capitalist states we...

The large shift in voting in the House of Commons on repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1842–46 period has led many analysts to focus on the political calculus of Peel’s government and on the role of ideology in shaping this policy change. While the claim that ideology was an independent source of change lacks substantiation, the claims about Peel’s ch...

Compares how industries are coordinated/supported by trade associations in Japan and the United States.

The authors present a theory of the general enabling conditions for war which predicts that war is possible, though not inevitable, when the conditions of the theory are satisfied. Whether a war will actually occur depends upon the idiosyncratic situational factors that are outside the scope of the theory. Three conditions make war possible: (i) As...

How can protectionism and “free” trade succeed one another? Our answer focuses on the changing balance of private actors’ political demands. These actors acquire interests in tariff policies because their assets are spatially concentrated, and trade in these assets is subject to various limitations. Actors in regions experiencing no new investment...

If a “structural” theory is one that purports to explain behavior in terms of environmental conditions and that largely eschews analysis of the internal processes of decision makers, then it is difficult to identify a theory of commercial policy which is not “structural.” Most microeconomic theory is structural; so are most balance-of-power theorie...

Although it is commonly argued that there is a connection between tariff levels and business conditions, this hypothesis has not been subjected to systematic empirical analysis or given any theoretical basis. The author presents two complementary theories of the movement of tariff levels in response to changing business conditions. Both explain tar...

Although the theory of hegemonic stability has attracted an impressive array of adherents, current formulations leave many conceptual issues unresolved. Existing formulations also fail to draw from the theory any implications concerning the process by which a hegemonic state creates and maintains a regime. As an example, Great Britain is generally...