Peer Reviewed Publications:

Monograph:

Abstraction in Experiments: Testing the Trade Offs, with Joshua D. Kertzer, Jonathan Renshon, and Chagai M. Weiss. Cambridge University Press, Elements in Experimental Political Science series, 2022. (Manuscript).

Journal Articles:

“Litigation for Sale: Private Firms and WTO Dispute Escalation” American Political Science Review. (PDF)

ABSTRACT: This paper presents a theory of lobbying by firms for trade liberalization, not through political contributions, but instead through contributions to the litigation process at the World Trade Organization. In this “litigation for sale” model, firms signal information about the strength and value of potential cases, and the government selects cases based on firms’ signals. Firms play a key role in monitoring and seeking enforcement of international trade law, which increases a state’s ability to pursue the removal of trade barriers and helps explain the high success rate for WTO complainants. The theory’s implications are consistent with interviews with trade experts and are tested against competing theories of direct political lobbying through an analysis of WTO dispute initiation.

“Perspective Taking and Security Dilemma Thinking: Cross-National Experimental Evidence from China and the United States” with Joshua Kertzer and Kai Quek, World Politics, (PDF, Appendix)

ABSTRACT: One of the central challenges in China-US relations is the risk of a security dilemma between China and the United States, as each side carries out actions for defensively-motivated reasons, but fails to realize how it is perceived by the other side. Yet how susceptible to security dilemma thinking are the Chinese and American publics? Can its deleterious effects be mitigated? We explore the individual-level microfoundations of security dilemma thinking, fielding parallel dyadic cross-national survey experiments in China and the United States. We find micro-level evidence consistent with the logic of the security dilemma in publics in both countries. We also find that IR scholars have overstated the palliative effects of perspective taking, which can backfire in the face of perceived threats to actors' identities and goals.  Our findings have important implications for the study of public opinion in China-US relations, and perspective taking in IR.

"The PhD Pipeline Initiative Works: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention to Help Under-Represented Students Prepare for PhDs in Political Science" Journal of Politics (PDF)

ABSTRACT: Enhancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is a priority for political science.  However, recruitment of historically underrepresented graduate students, and subsequently faculty, remains lackluster.  While numerous initiatives, such as the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute, have helped address the inequities, biases, and obstacles that perpetuate the lack of diversity in academia, the question remains how to create a successful, sustainable, and scalable intervention that can reach a broader population. This paper introduces the Pipeline Initiative in Political Science (PIPS), which was evaluated using the first randomized trial of a political science pipeline intervention. The program successfully recruited first-generation and underrepresented students, who were then admitted through a random lottery to the one-semester program. The program resulted in a 48.9 percentage point increase in the number of students who felt prepared to apply to PhD programs and helped students dramatically improve their application materials, thus increasing their chance of admission to graduate school.

"Butterfly Effects in Global Trade: International Borders, Disputes, and Trade Disruption and Diversion," with Tim Marple, Journal of Peace Research. (PDF).

ABSTRACT: This paper theorizes and tests how different types of interstate conflict across borders affect trade between disputing parties and trade diversion with third parties. Building on theories of borders as institutions, we differentiate the effects of two types of international disputes---border disputes and escalated militarized disputes---and draw on 60 years of trade and conflict data to test the effects of these disputes on bilateral and third-party trade flows. We find that border disputes and militarized disputes each depress trade flows between disputing countries. However, legal border disputes are associated with increased trade diversion with non-disputing countries, whereas militarized disputes have the opposite effect.  These results show that countries can offset bilateral trade losses from a border dispute by expanding trade with third-parties not involved in the dispute, but the same cannot be said of offsetting the losses from militarized disputes. 

“The Power of Compromise: Proposal Power, Partisanship, and Public Support in International Bargaining.” World Politics, January, 2021, 72(1): 128-166. (PDF).

ABSTRACT: In an era of increasingly public diplomacy, conventional wisdom assumes that leaders who compromise lose the respect of their constituents and damage their reputations, which undermines the prospects for peace and cooperation. This paper challenges this assumption and tests how leaders can negotiate compromises and avoid paying domestic approval and reputation costs. Drawing on theories of individuals' core values, psychological processes, and partisanship, I argue that leaders reduce or eliminate domestic public constraints by exercising ``proposal power'' and initiating compromises. Employing survey experiments to test how public approval and perceptions of reputation respond to leaders' strategies across security and economic issues, I find attitudes toward compromise are conditioned by the ideology and partisanship of the audience and the president, with Republican leaders having greater leeway to negotiate compromises and Democratic voters being more supportive of compromise.  These contributions suggest that leaders who exercise proposal power have significant flexibility to negotiate compromise settlements in international bargaining.

"Abstraction and Detail in Experimental Design" with Joshua D. Kertzer, Jonathan Renshon, Dustin Tingley, and Chagai M. Weiss. American Journal of Political Science, 2022 (PDF, Appendix).

ABSTRACT: Political scientists designing experiments often face the question of how abstract or detailed their experimental stimuli should be. Typically, this question is framed in terms of tradeoffs relating to experimental control and generalizability: the more context introduced into studies, the less control, and the more difficulty generalizing the results. Yet, we have reason to question this tradeoff, and there is relatively little systematic evidence to rely on when calibrating the degree of abstraction in studies. We make two contributions. First, we provide a theoretical framework which identifies and considers the consequences of three dimensions of abstraction in experimental design: situational hypotheticality, actor identity, and contextual detail. Second, we replicate and extend a range of survey experiments, varying these levels of abstraction. We find no evidence that situational hypotheticality substantively changes experimental results, but increased contextual detail dampens treatment effects and the salience of actor identities moderates results in specific situations.

“International Investment Disputes, Media Coverage, and Backlash Against International Law” with Anton Strezhnev. Journal of Conflict Resolution, April 2, 2022 https://doi.org/10.1177/00220027221081925 (PDF).

ABSTRACT: How international institutions and international law affect state behavior is a core question of international relations research. Since most international institutions lack independent enforcement, a broad range of theories argue that international institutions alter state behavior by mobilizing domestic audiences. This paper puts forth a theory explaining domestic backlash against international law and institutions by connecting media coverage — specifically the bias in the news media’s selection of international disputes — to public opinion formation towards international agreements. To test our theory, we examine both the content and effects of the media’s reporting on international disputes, focusing on the increasingly controversial form known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). We find that newspaper outlets in both the United States and Canada have a bias in favor of covering disputes filed against their home country as opposed to those filed by home country firms. Using a survey experiment, we further find that the bias in news story selection has a strong negative effect on attitudes towards ISDS and related agreements.

“Institutional Design, Information Transmission, and Public Opinion: Making the Case for Trade” with Siyao Li. Journal of Conflict Resolution, April 2022 (PDF).

ABSTRACT:  Domestic debates about trade have increased the salience of international economic cooperation among the public, raising the question of whether, and how, domestic support can be rallied in support of international trade agreements. We argue that institutional features of trade agreements provide important cues to domestic audiences that shape support, particularly the membership composition and voting rules for multilateral deals. We use two survey experiments to show that the US public is more supportive of trade when it is negotiated with like-minded countries. We also find that the voting rules shape support for trade agreements, but differently across partisan audiences. Republican voters strongly favor the home country having veto power, whereas Democrats prefer agreements with equal voting rules. These differences are largely driven by perceptions of the agreement's benefit for the nation and the public's trust of the negotiators and perceived fairness of the rules.

"Trade Wars and Election Interference" with Stephen Chaudoin and Max Kagan. Review of International Organizations, June 2022. (PDF).

ABSTRACT: In response to the Trump trade war, China, the EU, and other countries enacted politically-targeted trade retaliation (PTTR) against swing states and Republican strongholds in the United States. We argue that PTTR increases public concerns about foreign election interference and assess the effects of such retaliation across partisan affiliations.  We test our predictions using a national survey experiment in the United States fielded before the 2020 election. In contrast to findings about sanctions and foreign endorsements, we find strong evidence that PTTR increases fears of election interference among both Republicans and Democrats.  Partisan double standards in reaction to PTTR were strongest for retaliation targeting swing states and smaller for retaliation targeting the President's base.  Overall, the evidence shows that economic policies which are not primarily intended to influence elections may nevertheless come to be viewed by the public as foreign election interference.

"At What Cost? Power, Payments, and Public Support of International Organizations" with Richard Clark. Review of International Organizations, 2022. (PDF). 

ABSTRACT: As the U.S. disengages from international organizations (IOs), doubts exist about the future of the liberal international order. Yet, scholars have rarely examined what drives support of IOs from the world's largest donor. We contend that citizens weigh elite cues about the financial burden associated with U.S. leadership of these organizations against the influence that funding affords the U.S. over policymaking. Moreover, we argue that political ideology is a powerful moderator – conservatives should respond more positively to rhetoric about the influence the U.S. possesses over IOs and more negatively to cues about the financial costs of such leadership. A survey experiment administered to a diverse sample of Americans offers support for the core theory, but also counterintuitively reveals that conservatives respond less negatively to the costs of IO membership, while liberals dislike U.S. dominance of IOs, as it erodes perceived fairness.

“Fair Share? Equality and Equity in American Attitudes Toward Trade” with Brian Rathbun. International Organization, Summer, 2021, 75(3): 880-900. doi:10.1017/S0020818321000084  (PDF).

ABSTRACT:  American politicians repeatedly and strenuously invoke concerns about fairness when pitching their trade policies to their constituents, unsurprisingly since fairness is one of the most fundamental and universal moral concepts. Yet studies to date on public opinion towards trade have not been designed in such a way as to test whether fairness is important, nor whether the mass public applies fairness standards impartially. Drawing on findings in social psychology and behavioral economics, we develop and find evidence for an "asymmetric fairness" argument. In a national survey of Americans, we find strong evidence that fairness, conceived in terms of equality, is crucial for understanding support for potential trade deals and support for renegotiating existing ones. Americans view as most fair and most preferable outcomes in which concessions and benefits are equal, especially when those equal benefits match productivity. However, we find that Americans have an egoistically biased sense of fairness, responding particularly negatively to any outcome that leaves the United States relatively worse off, a sense of injustice that does not extend to the same degree to relative gains for Americans. 

"Labor Market Volatility, Gender, and Trade Preferences" with Alexandra Guisinger. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 1-14. FirstView May 28, 2021 doi: 10.1017/XPS.2021.9 (PDF, Appendix).

ABSTRACT: What explains divides in the public's support for trade protection? Traditional economic arguments primarily focus on individuals' expectations for increased or decreased wages in the face of greater economic openness, yet studies testing such wage-based concerns identify a different divide as well: even after accounting for wage effects, women are typically more supportive of trade protection. We argue that trade-induced employment volatility and the resulting concerns for employment stability are overlooked factors that help explain the gender divide in attitudes. Due to both structural discrimination and societal norms, we theorize that working women are more responsive to the threat of trade-related employment instability than male counterparts. Using an experiment fielded on national samples in the United States and Canada, we find that most respondents have weak reactions to volatility, but volatility has a significant effect on women who are the most vulnerable to trade's disruptive effects -- those working in import-competing industries and those with limited education.

“A Dispositional Theory of Reputation Costs” with Joshua Kertzer. International Organization, Summer, 2018, 72(3): 693-724. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000188 (PDF).

ABSTRACT: Politicians frequently turn to reputational arguments to bolster support for their proposed foreign policies. Yet despite the prevailing belief that domestic audiences care about reputation, there is very little direct evidence that publics care about reputation costs, and very little understanding of how.  We offer a dispositional theory of reputation costs, where the multidimensional nature of reputation leads individuals to rely on core dispositions to assess reputation costs; although the mass public does indeed care about reputation, it therefore does so in a way that violates the assumptions of canonical models of reputation in foreign policy. We employ a diverse array of methodological tools — from vignette-based survey experiments to automated text analysis — to gain a richer understanding of the causes, character, and consequences of reputation costs in crisis bargaining. Depending on the composition of their domestic audience, leaders thus face more complex incentive structures in crisis bargaining than our existing models of reputation acknowledge.

“Decomposing Audience Costs: Bringing the Audience Back into Audience Cost Theory” with Joshua Kertzer. American Journal of Political Science, July, 2016, 60(1): 234-249. (PDF, Supplementary Appendix) 

ABSTRACT: According to a growing tradition in International Relations, one way governments can credibly signal their intentions in foreign policy crises is by creating domestic audience costs: leaders can tie their hands by publicly threatening to use force, since domestic publics punish leaders who say one thing and do another. We argue here that there are actually two logics of audience costs: audiences can punish leaders both for being inconsistent (the traditional audience cost), and for threatening to use force in the first place (a belligerence cost). We employ an experiment that disentangles these two rationales, and turn to a series of dispositional characteristics from political psychology to bring the audience back into audience cost theory. Our results suggest that traditional audience cost experiments may overestimate how much people care about inconsistency, and that the logic of audience costs (and the implications for crisis bargaining) varies considerably with the leader’s constituency.

“Balancing Law and Politics: Judicial Incentives in WTO Dispute Settlement” with Julia C. Morse. Review of International Organizations, June 2015, 10(2): 179-205. (PDF)

ABSTRACT: Can international courts ever be independent of state influence? If not, how do courts manage the tension between legal principles and political concerns? We address these questions through an analysis of one of the most independent international adjudication mechanisms – dispute settlement at the World Trade Organization (WTO). We find evidence that WTO dispute settlement panels moderate the negative effects of judgements against the United States and the European Union by limiting the scope of such verdicts. Through an examination of judicial incentives, we argue that WTO panels use this practice to increase the prospects for compliance and decrease the likelihood of a verdict being overturned by the Appellate Body.

Working Papers:

“Trade, Conflict, and Cooperation: How IOs affect Domestic Support for International Agreements”

ABSTRACT: Negotiating international agreements requires leaders to successfully play a two-level game, whereby they must reach an agreement at the international level and build a supporting coalition at the domestic level. With the United States withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the recent vote for Brexit, we are reminded that building a supporting coalition for international cooperation at the domestic level is a critical step to achieving international cooperation. This paper tackles the question of how the negotiation process — specifically the proposal process — affects domestic support for international agreements and the likelihood of cooperation. I argue that international organizations can enhance domestic public support for negotiated agreements when they are perceived as initiating or proposing the agreement. Using an innovative series of survey experiments imbedded in current event news coverage about economic, security, and environmental negotiations, I test competing explanations of how proposal power and IOs affect domestic support for international cooperation. The results show that IOs enhance perceptions of procedural fairness for international negotiations, which results in higher levels of support for negotiated outcomes. This finding suggests that when IOs act as third-party proposers in international negotiations, it expands the domestic win-set of supported agreements and enhances support for international cooperation.

"International Economic Relations and American Support for Antitrust Policy" with Amy Pond 

ABSTRACT: Antitrust policy aims to reduce industrial concentration and increase competition among firms. Although traditionally the purview of domestic politics, the proliferation of large multinational corporations has raised new challenges for antitrust law. Countries' pursuit of antitrust policy and international cooperation on antitrust depends on their domestic politics, especially when firms headquartered in their country are likely targets of antitrust regulation. We theorize that support for domestic and international antitrust policy is shaped by individuals' concerns for their individual and country's economic prospects, and that these concerns also vary based on people's exposure to import-competition and levels of nationalism. We test our theory using a survey experiment on Americans and find that individuals are concerned about the effects of antitrust policy on national competitiveness, especially being placed at a disadvantage relative to foreign competitors, and that individuals have stronger support for antitrust policies when they are enforced against foreign firms. 

"Individual Preferences for Antitrust Policy" with Amy Pond 

ABSTRACT: Market concentration has increased dramatically in recent years with large companies consolidating their dominant positions. Simultaneously, calls for strengthening antitrust policies to reduce concentration have come from both the left and the right, yet we know little about public support for antitrust policies. We theorize and test the microfoundations of support for antitrust policies in the United States. We theorize that support for antitrust law is shaped by a combination of individual-level factors and economic concerns that are frequently emphasized by the media and political elites. Using a survey experiment we test how arguments about the economic and political effects of antitrust policies shape public support. We find that partisanship, education, gender, and upward mobility are strongly correlated with antitrust support. Surprisingly, arguments about prices, efficiency, and the political effects of antitrust laws have little effect on public support. However, concerns about the potential for antitrust laws to punish successful companies have a strong negative effect on support for antitrust laws.  Our findings explain the contours of public support for antitrust policies in the United States and the political rhetoric that does (and does not) affect support for antitrust law.

Framing Layoffs: Media Coverage, Blame Attribution, and Trade-Related Policy Responses, Alexandra Guisinger

ABSTRACT: Who is to blame when factories close or when there are mass layoffs? Whether it be the closing of an auto plant or the threatened off-shoring of the Carrier furnace factory, media reports frequently incorporate justifications -- or frames -- that provide context about the closure or layoffs.  We conduct an analysis of media coverage of factory layoffs in the United States and Canada, and find that the most common frames often include foreign competition and trade policy, costly government policies, changing market conditions, or exogenous shocks, such as the pandemic.  We argue that such frames alter who the public holds responsible, which shapes the incentives of politicians while also affecting the public's preferred policy responses.  We test the effect of media frames on the public's blame attribution and subsequent policy preferences using a survey experiment about General Motors factory closings. The results from a sample of almost 6,000 respondents in the US and Canada show that the public is quick to shift blame to the government, reducing blame to the company. We find that the media frames significantly shift support for trade policy in both countries, but have no effect on domestic public assistance programs such as unemployment benefits or retraining and education programs.