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 the actor implicated by 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
Who Supports Peace with the FARC? A Sensitivity-Based Approach Under Imperfect Identification. Under review.
[Working paper] [Poster presented at PolMeth 2018]
[Working paper] [Poster presented at PolMeth 2018]
What causes some civilians to support peace while others do not after violent conflict? The 2016 referendum for a peace agreement with the FARC in Colombia has spawned a growing literature studying determinants of support for peace, focusing largely on the effects of (i) prior exposure to violence and (ii) political affiliation with the deal's champion. However, as with many substantively important questions regarding real world effects, observational studies are unable to rule out confounding, leaving defensible causal claims beyond reach. We demonstrate what progress can be made in these circumstances by a sensitivity-based approach, which shifts away from arguing whether an effect "is identified'' (i.e. that confounding bias is exactly zero) to instead evaluate and discuss precisely how strong confounding would need to be to alter the study's conclusions. Employing newly available sensitivity analysis tools for linear regression, we find that the relationship between exposure to violence and support for peace can be overturned by even very weak confounders. By contrast, the relationship between prior political affiliation with the deal's champion and support for peace would require very powerful confounding to explain away. We also show how sensitivity analyses can be conducted using only the published regression results of prior studies, producing similar conclusions. Beyond this case, we argue that wider adoption of the sensitivity-based approach would facilitate greater transparency, improve productive scrutiny for both readers and reviewers, and facilitate valid investigation of important questions for which identification is imperfect.
Of Hacking and Human Rights: Designing the International Attribution Rules (with Leslie Johns). Under review.
[Working paper]
[Working paper]
Cyberattacks pose a grave threat to states, but many prominent attacks go unpunished under international law, in part because attacks carried out by individual ‘hacktivists’ are not attributable to states. Attribution rules under the lex generalis on state responsibility – which covers cyberattacks – contain multiple disconnects between legal breaches and punishments. However, many specialized areas of law depart from this approach. What explains this variation? We argue that to understand the existing and potential design of attribution rules, 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 for attribution. We argue that the general attribution rules 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 on attribution that are used by other institutions and areas of law. Without stronger rules that make the conduct of ‘hacktivists’ attributable to states, it may be difficult—if not impossible—to adequately counter the dangers posed by cyber threats.
