Dissertation and Book Project
Past Regret, Future Fear: Compliance with International Law
[Job market paper]
[Job market paper]
Why do democratic governments that support human rights sometimes defy the rulings of international human rights courts? In my dissertation, I examine this question in the context of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a regional court that operates in Latin America. I argue that non-compliance results from (1) high capacity constraints that limit leaders' ability to comply; and from (2) democratic leaders responding to voter preferences against compliance. Although human rights scholars generally assume that voters support compliance, I find that attitudes toward compliance are not so uniform when the military is implicated. Justice for human rights violations often necessitates confronting the abuses of the past, which some voters would prefer to leave alone. Despite the abuses committed by military officials in recent dictatorships, the military is still a trusted institution in many Latin American states. Leaders thus face a dilemma when they receive judgments from the Inter-American Court: do they follow international law, or do they choose the policies that voters want? I show that the leader's decision to comply is a function of the public's preferences on compliance and the leader's need to be accountable to the public. As the need for accountability increases, the leader becomes more responsive to the public's -- as opposed to her own -- preferences. Thus, if the public supports compliance, the leader is more likely to comply as the need for accountability increases; however, if the public does not support compliance, the leader is less likely to comply.
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 measures of indicators for democratic (elections) and undemocratic (military coups) threats to the leader's power, including a discrete measure of proximity to next election and public opinion data from two cross-national surveys. 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 an increased need for accountability to domestic actors, and that these effects are tempered by the popularity of the implicated actors. For example, when the military – the most frequent culprit – is at fault for a human rights violation, the probability of compliance decreases as public support for the military increases. I supplement my statistical work with evidence from semi-structured interviews with attorneys and judges, and an in-depth case study on member-states' responses to court rulings on the necessary repeal of amnesty laws. My findings suggest the importance of incorporating the public's preferences into existing models of international law.
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 measures of indicators for democratic (elections) and undemocratic (military coups) threats to the leader's power, including a discrete measure of proximity to next election and public opinion data from two cross-national surveys. 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 an increased need for accountability to domestic actors, and that these effects are tempered by the popularity of the implicated actors. For example, when the military – the most frequent culprit – is at fault for a human rights violation, the probability of compliance decreases as public support for the military increases. I supplement my statistical work with evidence from semi-structured interviews with attorneys and judges, and an in-depth case study on member-states' responses to court rulings on the necessary repeal of amnesty laws. My findings suggest the importance of incorporating the public's preferences into existing models of international law.
Other projects
Credible or Confounded? Applying Sensitivity Analyses to Improve Research and its Evaluation Under Imperfect Identification (with Chad Hazlett). Under review.
[Working paper] [Poster presented at PolMeth 2018]
[Working paper] [Poster presented at PolMeth 2018]
Social scientists pose important questions about the effects of potential causes, but often cannot eliminate all possible confounders in defense of causal claims. Sensitivity analyses can be useful in these circumstances, providing a route to rigorously investigate causal questions despite imperfect identification. Further, if more widely adopted, these tools have the potential to improve upon standard practice for communicating the robustness causal claims, while suggesting new ways for readers and reviewers to judge research. We illustrate these uses of sensitivity analysis in an application that examines two potential causes of support for the 2016 Colombian referendum for peace with the FARC. Conventional regression analyses find "statistically and substantively significant" estimated effects for both causes. Yet, sensitivity analyses reveal very weak confounders could overturn one cause (exposure to violence), but extremely powerful confounders are needed to overturn the other (political affiliation with the deal's champion).
Of Hacking and Human Rights: Designing the International Law of State Responsibility (with Leslie Johns). Under review.
[Working paper]
[Working paper]
The lex generalis on state responsibility contains multiple disconnects between legal breaches and punishments. General rules on attribution limit the responsibility of states for individuals; numerous circumstances preclude the wrongfulness of breaches; and the consequences of breaches are at best restorative, not punitive. But many specialized areas of law depart from this approach. What explains this variation? We argue that to understand the existing and potential design of the law of state responsibility, we must understand why states are tempted to break international law. In this paper, we describe three competing political theories of why states break international law (enforcement, managerial, and flexibility). We then elucidate the implications of each of these theories for how states design rules of state responsibility. We argue that the general rules on state responsibility accommodate managerial and flexibility concerns, but neglect the competing objective of enforcement. We then argue that when states prioritize enforcement, they should design specialized rules. We demonstrate the plausibility of our approach by examining case-law from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which differs from the general rules that are used by other institutions and areas of law.
