Abstract

This article examines how changes in formal political institutions can affect the extent to which a nationally defined monetary policy is committed to an international monetary order by comparing the German and French cases during the period of 1919-1929. There is no dearth of studies that employ domestic political institutional variables to explain policy outcomes regarding international economic relations. And at the same time, for the past decade, a host of "second image reversed" works have improved our understanding of domestic-international interaction. While many scholars of international political economy have written about domestic sources of trade policy, increasing numbers of authors have devoted substantial attention to the explanatory power of domestic variables in monetary issues. Particularly, when accounting for variations on democratic commitment to international monetary cooperation, the importance of executive-legislative relations deserves special attention. Germany and France during the 1920s provide us with an interesting pair of comparison in that their parliamentary democracies had subtle differences in executive-legislative relations.