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Among the most momentous decisions that leaders of a state are called upon to make is whether or not to initiate warfare. How their military will fare against the opponent may be the first consideration, but not far behind are concerns about domestic political response and the reaction of the international community. Securing Approval makes clear the relationship between these two seemingly distinct concerns, demonstrating how multilateral security organizations like the UN influence foreign policy through public opinion without ever exercising direct enforcement power. While UN ap

Among the most momentous decisions that leaders of a state are called upon to make is whether or not to initiate warfare. How their military will fare against the opponent may be the first consideration, but not far behind are concerns about domestic political response and the reaction of the international community. Securing Approval makes clear the relationship between these two seemingly distinct concerns, demonstrating how multilateral security organizations like the UN influence foreign policy through public opinion without ever exercising direct enforcement power. While UN ap.

Despite increased attention to the linkages between domestic politics and international relations in political science literature over the last 20 years, considerable debate remains about how well equipped citizens are to act as informed constraints on governments or how attentive and responsive government actors are to public opinion. Debates about citizens' ability to act as a check on government behavior are not new, of course, and have a long tradition in political philosophy and in public discourse. Yet the proliferation of theories of domestic–international linkages in contemporary IR scholarship has unfortunately been accompanied by incomplete dialogue between public opinion and IR scholars and often by claims of unidirectional or unconditional causality regarding domestic constraints, elite framing and opinion leadership, citizens' informational capacities, and the role of the media. The relationship among these factors in shaping foreign policy is quite complex, however, and fortunately Thomas Knecht acknowledges this complexity and advances a conditional argument about the relationship between public attitudes and presidential decision making.

Thomas Knecht provides a thoughtful and fair assessment of my book, Securing Approval. He raises three reasonable critiques that I respond to here.

AbstractRecent work suggests that multilateral security institutions, such as the UN Security Council, can influence foreign policy through public opinion. According to this view, authorization can increase public support for foreign policy, freeing domestic constraints. Governments that feel constrained by public opinion may thus alter their foreign policies to garner external authorization. These claims challenge traditional realist views about the role of international organizations in security affairs, which tend to focus on direct enforcement mechanisms and neglect indirect channels of influence. To examine these claims, this article investigates the first link in this causal chain—the effect of institutional statements on public opinion. Strategic information arguments, as opposed to arguments about the symbolic legitimacy of specific organizations or the procedural importance of consultation, posit that the effect of institutional statements on public opinion is conditional on public perceptions of member states' interests. This article tests this conditional relationship in the context of changes in presidential approval surrounding military disputes, using a measure of preference distance between the United States and veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council. Findings indicate that short-term changes in presidential approval surrounding the onset of military disputes in the United States between 1946 and 2001 have been significantly larger when accompanied by a positive resolution for a Security Council that is more distant in terms of foreign policy preferences. The article also discusses polling data during the 1990s and 2000s that support the strategic information perspective.

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the informational role of international institutions. However, several questions about the informational aspects of institutional behavior remain underexplored: What determines how audiences respond to institutional decisions? Through what channels does information provision affect foreign policy? To answer these questions, I develop a formal model motivated by recent literature on the informational effects of security institutions. The formal model depicts information transmission between a domestic audience, an international institution, and a foreign policy maker. Statements issued by member states through the institution serve to inform the audience about the likely outcomes of its leader's actions. The model demonstrates that leaders have incentives to consult relatively conservative institutions, because their support convinces audiences that they should also support proposed policies. Leaders face incentives to avoid the disapproval of more revisionist institutions, because their opposition will tend to induce public opposition. The empirical implications are discussed.

Abstract
Can international organizations improve natural resource governance? The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is most noted for its role in crisis lending, where it can wield the "teeth" of loan suspensions to push for reforms. But IMF officials also spend a large amount of time conducting routine surveillance through Article IV consultations, which assess a country's economic developments and provide non-binding recommendations. Do governments follow this "toothless" advice? To answer this question, we examine the content of all Article IV staff appraisals published between 2004 and 2019. Using text analysis and a difference-in-differences estimator, we find that resource-rich developing countries are more likely to adopt legislation reforming the oil, gas, and mining sectors in the wake of an Article IV appraisal that extensively discusses the natural resource sector and recommends natural resource governance reforms. Our results suggest that technocratic advice—a tool often overlooked in international organization scholarship—can lead to the adoption of policies that help ameliorate the resource curse.