Dissertation and Book Project
Past Regret, Future Fear: Why Leaders Comply with the Rulings of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
International law has increasingly recognized individuals as rights-holders to whom states owe obligations, and international human rights courts can demand relatively costly changes from their members. For example, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights often orders its members to change domestic laws, reform prisons, and prosecute former military officials. In my dissertation, I ask: why do leaders sometimes follow – but other times ignore – these rulings? I argue that compliance sends a costly signal of the leader’s policy preferences to the public. The public in weak democracies can pose varying levels of threat to the leader’s power. When the public poses little threat to the leader, there is separating behavior: leaders decide whether to comply based on their true preferences. However, when the public poses a greater threat to the leader, there is pooling behavior that reflects the public’s preference for compliance: when the public poses a greater threat and supports compliance, leaders pool on compliance, and when the public opposes compliance, leaders pool on non-compliance.
I test my theory using quantitative and qualitative methods. I construct an original dataset of all rulings from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights through 2014 and measure compliance using Court-issued monitoring reports. I combine these data with cross-national survey data on citizen attitudes toward democracy and various domestic institutions from AmericasBarometer and the World Values Survey. I use event history analysis to model the leader’s time to compliance. My results show that leaders are more likely to comply when they face increased domestic threats to their political power, and that these effects are tempered by the popularity of the implicated actors. For example, when the police are at fault for a human rights violation, the probability of compliance decreases as public support for the police increases. I supplement my statistical work with evidence from semi-structured interviews with attorneys, judges, and state officials.
I test my theory using quantitative and qualitative methods. I construct an original dataset of all rulings from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights through 2014 and measure compliance using Court-issued monitoring reports. I combine these data with cross-national survey data on citizen attitudes toward democracy and various domestic institutions from AmericasBarometer and the World Values Survey. I use event history analysis to model the leader’s time to compliance. My results show that leaders are more likely to comply when they face increased domestic threats to their political power, and that these effects are tempered by the popularity of the implicated actors. For example, when the police are at fault for a human rights violation, the probability of compliance decreases as public support for the police increases. I supplement my statistical work with evidence from semi-structured interviews with attorneys, judges, and state officials.
Other projects
Credible or Confounded? What We Know and Don't about Who Supports Peace with the FARC (with Chad Hazlett)
What, if anything, can we say about what drove peoples’ decisions in voting for the peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)? In October 2016, Colombians voted in a referendum on a negotiated settlement with FARC, a paramilitary group that had carried out high-casualty attacks against civilians for several decades. The peace deal would end the conflict, but it also provided amnesty for FARC soldiers and guaranteed seats for FARC in the legislature. After the accord’s narrow defeat, news outlets identified both exposure to violence and political affiliation with the president as potential explanations for how people voted. We examine the extent to which these factors explain the variation in support for peace across municipalities and assess what there is to say about a causal relationship between those factors and the outcome of the vote. This project is motivated both by the substantive question of whether people support peace over justice, and by methodological concerns about what careful researchers can say or do when there is no readily available causal identification strategy. Because any explanatory variable is likely to be heavily confounded, we employ tools of sensitivity analysis to model how strong a potential confounder would need to be in order to subsume the observed relationships. We argue that while the evidence is consistent with both violence and political affiliation affecting support for peace, the violence hypothesis is extremely fragile: even the weakest confounder, just barely correlated with violence and support for peace, is enough to overwhelm the result.
