R.O. Keohane Award
International Organization congratulates Jeff Colgan as the recipient of the 2010 Robert O. Keohane Award. (The Robert O. Keohane Award acknowledges Keohane’s years of service to International Organization and support of junior scholars. It is given annually to an untenured scholar published in IO.)
In his article “Oil and Revolutionary Governments: Fuel for International Conflict” (64.4, Autumn 2010), Colgan takes an important contemporary question about international relations: why do “petrol-states” seem to be more aggressive internationally than other states? Colgan challenges the widely held view that oil-rich states are the objects of resource competition, and instead develops a theory based on the incentives and preferences of revolutionary governments who lead oil-rich states. He theorizes that revolutionary leaders are selected through processes that tend to render them violent and risk-acceptant. Oil resources provide the wherewithal to accrue military power. The combination is explosive for international conflict. Colgan finds that revolutionary governments presiding over petrol-states are much more likely than other governments to engage in aggressive militarized interstate disputes. The selection committee liked the theoretical innovation, the new data on revolutionary governments, and the statistical rigor of Colgan’s article. His findings are important for understanding how domestic politics and economic are linked to international conflict behavior.
Past Winners
In his original, carefully executed, and well-written article “Oil, Nontax Revenue, and the Redistributional Foundations of Regime Stability” (Winter 2009) Morrison brings together a number of heretofore separate strands of the literature (resource curse, foreign aid) by way of his concept, “nontax revenue.” His theory yields precise predictions about the effect that non-tax revenues will have on political stability in both dictatorships and democracies. Stability goes up under both regimes, but for fundamentally different reasons. Morrison points out the different mechanisms that enable this in democracies and autocracies. In dictatorships, nontax revenue leads to greater regime stability since dictators will have greater ability to appease citizens and thereby prevent a revolution or transition to democracy. In democracies, the presence of nontax revenue will reduce the desire of citizens to raise tax revenue. This enhances stability since elites will have less dissatisfaction under democracy.
The article received strong nominations from board members, who stressed that the article contributes to an advance in the literature, and that it also has important implications for policy.
Jessica Weeks’s article, “Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve” (Winter 2008) makes a major contribution to our understanding of international conflict. Before Weeks, many scholars thought that democracies could signal their intentions more credibly than autocracies. This conventional wisdom relied, in part, on the assumption that democratic leaders would suffer greater domestic “audience costs” for not following through on international threats. Weeks argues, to the contrary, that many autocrats are highly vulnerable to domestic audience costs and can, therefore, signal their resolve as effectively as democratic leaders. Weeks develops a theory that explains when and how audience costs arise in autocracies. She then shows, through rigorous quantitative analysis of militarized disputes, that democracies do not have a signaling advantage over most autocracies. The work sheds new light on the foreign policies of autocratic regimes and overturns a key theory purporting to explain the democratic peace. Weeks’s article is already being assigned in PhD courses, and the committee expects that, over time, it will be a highly cited contribution to the field of international relations.
2007 - Erik Voeten
Erik Voeten’s 2007 research article, “The Politics of International Judicial Appointments: Evidence from the European Court of Human Rights,” is a model of a clearly-argued and persuasive contribution to a debate of substantial theoretical and practical importance. The sources and consequences of judicial activism have been the subject of heated argument, especially in European politics. Erik’s contribution is to address observed variation in levels of judicial activism and to account for it. He has created a new data set on judicial dissents that he cleverly uses to estimate each judge’s preferred level of activism. He then considers alternative explanations for such variation, finding powerful evidence that governments that favor European integration appoint more activist judges. His work thus contributes to our understanding of European integration and of the relationship between governments and international courts more generally, pointing to a model in which judges are considered agents of the governments that appoint them.
2006 - Alexander Thompson
In “Coercion Through IOs: The Security Council and the Logic of Information Transmission” (Winter 2006), Thompson provides a careful, thoughtful analysis of why powerful states sometimes work through international organizations to attain their military goals. He argues that by accepting the costs and constraints of working through an international organization, a state can signal benign intentions and so increase international support and reduce international opposition. In his analysis, Thompson engages several prominent--and very different--theoretical approaches and teases out observable implications for each hypothesis. His empirics engage the important 1990-91 Gulf War case and more generally support an informational rationale for the involvement of the Security Council in coercive politics. In short, this article brings theoretical sophistication and empirical nuance to the study of international organizations in security affairs.
2005 - Ian Hurd
For “The Strategic Use of Liberalism: Libya and the UN sanctions 1992-2003” (from the Summer 2005 issue)
2004 - Kenneth Scheve
For “Public Inflation Aversion and the Political Economy of Macroeconomic Policymaking” (Winter 2004) was the first recipient of the R.O. Keohane Award