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| 1 |
ID:
121595
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Experimental evidence in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics is transforming the way political science scholars think about how humans make decisions in areas of high complexity, uncertainty, and risk. Nearly all those studies utilize convenience samples of university students, but in the real world political elites actually make most pivotal political decisions such as threatening war or changing the course of economic policy. Highly experienced elites are more likely to exhibit the attributes of rational decision-making; and over the last fifteen years a wealth of studies suggest that such elites are likely to be more skilled in strategic bargaining than samples with less germane experience. However, elites are also more likely to suffer overconfidence, which degrades decision-making skills. We illustrate implications for political science with a case study of crisis bargaining between the US and North Korea. Variations in the experience of US elite decision-makers between 2002 and 2006 plausibly explain the large shift in US crisis signaling better than other rival hypotheses such as "Iraq fatigue." Beyond crisis bargaining other major political science theories might benefit from attention to the attributes of individual decision-makers.
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| 2 |
ID:
170028
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Political corruption is rampant in—and destructive to—many parts of the world. A growing number of international organizations (IOs) claim to address the problem by encouraging good governance norms and rules, such as anti-corruption standards and practices. Whether membership in IOs dampens corruption, however, is unclear. Our central argument is that the characteristics of IO membership determine both whether corruption is tolerated and the extent to which formal anti-corruption rules effectively combat the problem. First, groups of corrupt states are reticent to enforce good governance norms or rules against other IO members, rendering punishment for corruption incredible. Second, leaders may witness the value of corruption to their IO peers and learn to act the same way. Using a variety of data sources and estimation strategies, including new data on IO anti-corruption mandates, we demonstrate that: (1) countries that participate in member-corrupted IOs are significantly more likely to engage in corruption themselves—and experience an increase in corruption over time—than are countries that participate in less corrupt IOs; and (2) this tolerance for corruption occurs even within IOs that have adopted formal anti-corruption mandates, rendering good governance rules largely cheap talk among organizations governed by corrupt principles.
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| 3 |
ID:
134979
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Why do some decision makers prefer big multilateral agreements while others prefer cooperation in small clubs? Does enforcement encourage or deter institutional cooperation? We use experiments drawn from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology—along with a substantive survey focused on international trade—to illustrate how two behavioral traits (patience and strategic reasoning) of individuals who play key roles in negotiating and ratifying an international treaty shape their preferences for how treaties are designed and whether they are ratified. Patient subjects were more likely to prefer treaties with larger numbers of countries (and larger long-term benefits), as were subjects with the skill to anticipate how others will respond over multiple iterations of strategic games. The presence of an enforcement mechanism increased subjects' willingness to ratify treaties; however, strategic reasoning had double the effect of adding enforcement to a trade agreement: more strategic subjects were particularly likely to favor ratifying the agreement. We report these results for a sample of 509 university students and also show how similar patterns are revealed in a unique sample of ninety-two actual US policy elites. Under some conditions certain types of university student convenience samples can be useful for revealing elite-dominated policy preferences—different types of people in the same situation may prefer to approach decision-making tasks and reason through trade-offs in materially different ways
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| 4 |
ID:
107532
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2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Several prominent human rights treaties seek to minimize violations during emergencies by authorizing states to "derogate"-that is, to suspend certain civil and political liberties-in response to crises. The drafters of these treaties envisioned that international restrictions on derogations, together with international notification and monitoring mechanisms, would limit rights suspensions during emergencies. This article analyzes the behavior of derogating countries using new global data sets of derogations and states of emergency from 1976 to 2007. We argue that derogations are a rational response to domestic political uncertainty. They enable governments facing serious threats to buy time and legal breathing space from voters, courts, and interest groups to confront crises while signaling to these audiences that rights deviations are temporary and lawful. Our findings have implications for studies of treaty design and flexibility mechanisms, and compliance with international human rights agreements.
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| 5 |
ID:
078635
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2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
International human rights language has swept across the landscape of contemporary world politics in a trend that began in the 1970s, picked up speed after the Cold War's end, and quickened yet again in the latter half of the 1990s. Yet, while this human rights `talk' has fundamentally reshaped the way in which global policy elites, transnational activists, and some national leaders talk about politics and justice, actual impacts are more difficult to discern, requiring more nuance and disaggregation. Importantly, there may be substantial cross-regional variations, due to varying colonial and post-colonial histories, and different trajectories in state-society relations. In some instances, there are also important differences in tone between qualitative and quantitative researchers. While many case-study scholars tend to be rather optimistic about the potential for human rights change, statistically inclined researchers often lean towards greater caution and, in some cases, downright skepticism about the trans-formative potential of international human rights law and advocacy. Given that international human rights treaties, human rights reporting, democracy, and elections do not always influence state practice in expected ways, the authors call for more regionally disaggregated studies, coupled with greater efforts to combine qualitative and quantitative research techniques
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| 6 |
ID:
080975
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2008.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This special issue seeks to move forward the development of an empirical research agenda that takes seriously the complexity of how international organizations (IOs) function and the need to study that complexity at all levels of analysis by using robust research tools. We advocate for a broad empirical research approach that molds and sharpens theories about IOs by conducting systematic tests in large-sample environments. Two themes create a common thread throughout this issue. First, shifting the focus from whether IOs matter to how they work requires acknowledgment of the contingency of cause and effect. A second common thread lies in the authors' treatment of IO membership as an aggregate phenomenon-that is, as a set of institutions and relationships evolving over time and with many members rather than as a single organization.
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| 7 |
ID:
078637
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2007.
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| Summary/Abstract |
International human rights treaties have been ratified by many nation-states, including those ruled by repressive governments, raising hopes for better practices in many corners of the world. Evidence increasingly suggests, however, that human rights laws are most effective in stable or consolidating democracies or in states with strong civil society activism. If so, treaties may be failing to make a difference in those states most in need of reform — the world's worst abusers — even though they have been the targets of the human rights regime from the very beginning. The authors address this question of compliance by focusing on the behavior of repressive states in particular. Through a series of cross-national analyses on the impact of two key human rights treaties, the article demonstrates that (1) governments, including repressive ones, frequently make legal commitments to human rights treaties, subscribing to recognized norms of protection and creating opportunities for socialization and capacity-building necessary for lasting reforms; (2) these commitments mostly have no effects on the world's most terrible repressors even long into the future; (3) recent findings that treaty effectiveness is conditional on democracy and civil society do not explain the behavior of the world's most abusive governments; and (4) realistic institutional reforms will probably not help to solve this problem
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| 8 |
ID:
090613
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| 9 |
ID:
153921
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| Summary/Abstract |
Why would leaders engage in international cooperation if they believe that their own government might default from their commitments? Some suggest that when leaders do so, they are essentially trying to profit from false promises—from making international commitments that they likely cannot, or will not, actually fulfill. In contrast, others expect that fears of such non-compliance will deter leaders from engaging in international cooperation. Moreover, some theories suggest that the design of cooperative agreements themselves should affect how leaders respond to these possibilities. That is, leaders should be more concerned about the prospect of their country’s non-compliance with agreements that impose, through formal means, sizeable costs on recalcitrant states. We describe the results of an experimental survey conducted on 95 high-level policy elites in the United States that allows us to examine the causal dynamics that underlie this debate. We focus on one key institutional design feature—formal enforcement—and preferences for international cooperation under different perceptions of risk about future compliance. We provide the first elite-level evidence that, as the prospect of defection rises, actual policymakers become less willing to join international agreements. However, contrary to what many theories of international institutions would predict, the presence of a formal enforcement mechanism fails to explain their aversion to cooperation. Elites dislike making false promises even when their commitments are not formally enforceable. By measuring these elites’ patience (along with other traits), we tentatively suggest that this aversion may be linked to decision-makers’ own perceptions of the future—elites who have lower discount rates are particularly sensitive to the prospect of not honoring commitments.
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| 10 |
ID:
080977
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| Publication |
2008.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Does the dramatic rise of the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) worldwide make economic sanctions more likely through increasing the leverage of the powerful and pitting states against each other in competition (power) or less likely through increasing the benefits of trade, resolving disputes, and promoting like-minded communities (plenty)? The authors offer the first systematic test of these propositions, testing hypotheses on sanctions onset using a data set of episodes from 1947 through 2000. In favor of the plenty argument, increases in bilateral trade do decrease sanctioning behavior; in favor of the power argument, an increase in the potential sanctioner's GDP or centrality in the network of all PTAs make sanctioning much more likely. However, mutual membership in PTAs has no direct effect on the propensity of states to sanction each other
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| 11 |
ID:
146055
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| Summary/Abstract |
There is heated debate over the wisdom and effect of secrecy in international negotiations. This debate has become central to the process of foreign investment arbitration because parties to disputes nearly always can choose to hide arbitral outcomes from public view. Working with a new database of disputes at the world's largest investor-state arbitral institution, the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, the authors examine the incentives of firms and governments to keep the details of their disputes secret. The authors argue that secrecy in the context of investment arbitration works like a flexibility-enhancing device, similar to the way escape clauses function in the context of international trade. To attract and preserve investment, governments make contractual and treaty-based promises to submit to binding arbitration in the event of a dispute. They may prefer secrecy in cases when they are under strong political pressure to adopt policies that violate international legal norms designed to protect investor interests. Investors favor secrecy when managing politically sensitive disputes over assets they will continue to own and manage in host countries long after the particular dispute has passed. Although governments prefer secrecy to help facilitate politically difficult bargaining, secrecy diminishes one of the central purposes of arbitration: to allow governments to signal publicly their general commitment to investor-friendly policies. Understanding the incentives for keeping the details of dispute resolution secret may help future scholars explain more accurately the observed patterns of wins and losses from investor-state arbitration as well as patterns of investment.
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| 12 |
ID:
066942
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| 13 |
ID:
066353
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