Davis Bobrow and Mark Boyer address a topic of considerable current importance in both scholarly and policy circles—international cooperation, particularly among advanced industrial democracies—to produce what the authors call “progress,” that is, “improvements in actual and perceived conditions in fundamental terms—physical security, economic prosperity, ecological sustainability, and cultural continuity” (p. 6), and to avoid “regression,” defined as “worsening of those conditions in one or more of those respects” (p. 6). Their stated goal is to understand (in a clever reframing of the famous Harold Lasswell [1936] quote) “who gives, what, when, and how” (p. 1), since they believe that understanding this question is key to dealing successfully with a range of current global problems.

Bobrow and Boyer's primary contribution is a focus on domestic public opinion within advanced industrial democracies, and particularly the links between prevailing citizen beliefs and identities and the willingness of a state to contribute to global efforts. While never dismissing rationalist arguments about the costs and benefits of international cooperation, the authors suggest that rationalist arguments are incomplete—the shared identities of a population and variance in beliefs and identities across the populations of different states help to account for variance in global giving.

In particular, Bobrow and Boyer argue that prevailing views regarding three different issues among domestic populations will affect a state's contributions to global goods: 1) the extent to which the population views themselves as sharing an identity with others internationally and thinks of a “we” broader than their own state; 2) the extent to which working with others internationally and making a contribution to the world beyond state borders is viewed as a normatively appropriate government role; and 3) the extent to which working through international institutions and making particular types of international contributions are viewed as efficacious and beneficial to state goals.

The bulk of Defensive Internationalism offers descriptive statistics of public opinion polls in a variety of advanced industrial democracies and of international contributions to particular global cooperative efforts by states. Bobrow and Boyer present poll data both about internationalism in general and about three of the four specific policy issues that they address in more depth: international development assistance, United Nations peacekeeping operations, and environmental protection. Poll results are compared to descriptive statistics on contributions in each of these areas and in the area of debt management. The methods and language should be easily accessible to undergraduate political science students, and the authors provide copious tables to allow readers to see variance across countries.

Based on their evaluation of current public opinion and international giving among advanced industrial democracies, Bobrow and Boyer come to a position they term “muted optimism.” They are optimistic that efforts toward greater multilateralism and more international cooperation will continue in the future, but they recognize that identities remain primarily based in nation-states, and giving will thus continue to be dependent on beliefs in the private benefits associated with progress. The authors conclude their book with policy recommendations that they believe will enhance the prospects for increased global cooperation in the future.

This book fits within an increasingly common approach to understanding international behavior. The core idea is that leaders are constrained in their international actions by the expectations, needs, and desires of their domestic constituencies. Bobrow and Boyer write: “To contend otherwise is to assert politicians' indifference to the risks of political suicide or of draining, avoidable vulnerabilities subject to exploitation by domestic competitors” (p. 53). This is a point that is rigorously developed by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his colleagues in The Logic of Political Survival (2003). The broad implication of work in this tradition is that the divide between domestic and international politics is increasingly meaningless; foreign policy and domestic policy are driven by many of the same constraints and imperatives, and the separation of the study of international politics from internal politics is unwarranted and limiting.

The descriptive data provided in Defensive Internationalism raises a large number of questions. How can we explain variance in the extent to which populations feel an international or regional identity, view international giving as normatively appropriate, and believe international cooperation to be efficacious? Do these beliefs cause integration into the international system or result from it? To what extent do mass beliefs about the benefits and efficacy of “internationalism” correspond to actual costs, benefits, and effectiveness? If the correlation is high, how can we attribute causality to beliefs about efficacy rather than efficacy itself, and if the correlation is low, why is that the case? Bobrow and Boyer do a good job of laying out the public opinion landscape, but demonstrating convincingly that public opinion is a causal rather than an intervening, endogenous, or spurious variable in explaining international giving is likely to require additional work.