Dissertation

Dissertation: Supranational Law and Compliance

My dissertation project focuses supranational law (law that is not consent-based) and on reputation as a motivation for compliance with International Law. Reputation has been an important explanation for states' compliance with international law. Does reputation motivate states to comply as is purported? Many studies assert that compliance indeed has a reputational explanation but struggle with problems of endogeneity and selection given that international law is usually consent based. I bring in the less frequent case of non-consent based international law to evaluate the dominant reputational theory. If a country receives an international obligation as a mandate rather than signing on to the law for itself, it should suffer less of a reputational cost for not complying. Other countries will observe a violation of an obligation but not a violation of a commitment. If the reputational theory holds, these observing states should be less reluctant to enter into new cooperative agreements with a country that does not comply with a mandate than with a country that does not comply with a commitment. Specifically, I leverage several recent Security Council resolutions that create substantial obligations for all UN member states; countries not on the Security Council will see such resolutions as mandates. I compare compliance behavior of countries that participate in a resolution's approval versus those that receive it as a mandate using a mix of parametric and non-parametric methods in addition to a survey experiment.

Xinyuan Dai (Chair), Paul Diehl, Brian Gaines, Matthew Winters were my committee members.