Essays on the role of international institutions in political stability and democracy

The wide spread growth of international institutions raises doubts that their role is limited in World politics. Scholars of international relations and comparative politics investigated the role of IOs and offer a theoretical explanation as to why IOs have a significant role in world politics (Pevehouse 2005 and Keohane 2001). Increase in the volume of trade and the decrease in the cost of transportations and communications are counted as primary factors of IOs' influence on democratization and peace.;The goal of the second chapter is to investigate the role of IOs in democratization of their member states. The main finding is that the peer pressure of the democratic states in IOs explains the adoption of the democratic norms by nascent democracies and non-democratic countries. The result also shows that non-democratic and nascent democratic members of democratic IOs improve their democracy score as they stay longer in democratic IOs.;The chapter three investigates the role of multinational corporations in domestic political stability. The contribution to the literature is twofold. First, there is evidence of linkage between the interests of multinational corporations and that of governments of energy-rich countries. Second, evidence from cross-section-time-series regression models indicates that dependence on energy resources increases the likelihood of ethnic violence and decreases the likelihood of ethnic warfare. This result is explained by the joint role of multinational corporations and energy-importing industrialized countries in controlling organized ethnic warfare on one hand; on the other, failure to prevent ethnic violence.;Finally, the chapter four seeks to examine the role of international organizations in democratization from a regional standpoint. The study examines the role of the EU in the democratization process of Central and Eastern European countries, four Mediterranean countries. In contrast to previous studies in the field, this study uses empirical test to address a number of hypotheses and includes thirteen countries to examine the association between EU membership stages such as the application, negotiation and membership and the different aspect of democratization such as democratic consolidation, constitutional democracy, political rights and civil liberties.