Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

"Productive Pacifists: The Rise of Production-Oriented States and Decline of Profit-Motivated Conquest" with Jonathan Markowitz (USC), Benjamin A.T. Graham (USC), and Christopher J. Fariss (University of Michigan) - International Studies Quarterly (Forthcoming)

Online Appendix

Scholarship suggests the profits from conquest have decreased over time. Given this, why were some states faster to abandon profit-motivated conquest, and why are some still seeking wealth from territorial control? We argue that land-rent dependence influences a regime’s economic preference for territory. The more a state depends on rents extracted from land (i.e. the more land-oriented the economy), the greater its willingness to invest in securing control of territory. We develop a novel measure of land-orientation, with 200 years of data, to evaluate the linkages between land-orientation and military competition over territory. Across 160 regression models, we find robust evidence that land-orientation predicts territorial competition. These results hold in both democracies and autocracies. The global reduction in land-oriented states offers a plausible explanation for the decline in the number of large-scale territorial conquests. 

"Reserving Rights: Explaining Human Rights Treaty Reservations" with Kelebogile Zvobgo (USC, William and Mary) and Wayne Sandholtz (USC) - ​International Studies Quarterly ​(Forthcoming)

International relations scholarship has made significant strides in explaining how states design treaty obligations and why they accept treaty commitments. However, far less attention has been paid to factors that may influence states’ modification of their treaty obligations via reservations. We theorize that states will be more likely to enter reservations when treaty obligations increase compliance costs and policy adjustment costs. More specifically, we expect that demanding provisions, i.e., provisions that create strong, precise obligations requiring domestic action, will enhance the likelihood of reservation. To test our theory, we exploit an original dataset that codes reservations at the provision (treaty-article-paragraph) level for the ten core international human rights treaties. Consistent with our expectations, we find that states are more likely to enter reservations on more demanding treaty provisions. In contrast to prior studies, our results indicate that reservations are not driven purely by state-level characteristics like regime type and the nature of the legal system. Rather, it appears that states weigh individual treaty obligations and calibrate their commitments accordingly.

Revise and Resubmit

“Do Human Rights Treaty Obligations Matter for Ratification?” with Wayne Sandholtz (USC) and Kelebogile Zvobgo (USC, William and Mary) - R&R at ​Journal of Conflict Resolution

​Online Appendix

Why do some human rights treaties receive rapid and near universal commitment from states while others take decades for the majority of states to ratify? Little scholarship to date has analyzed the effects of treaty design, in particular, the substance of treaty obligations, on the likelihood of ratification. We analyze new data that code every provision of ten global human rights treaties for the strength and precision of the obligations they contain. We classify obligations that are strong, precise, and that require domestic action as “demanding.” We hypothesize that treaties containing more of these demanding obligations would be seen as more costly to ratify because they imply potentially greater policy adaptation or compliance costs. Event history analyses are consistent with that hypothesis. The addition of 15 demanding treaty obligations decreases the likelihood of ratification by nearly 20 percent, similar to the effect of moving from democracy to autocracy. This effect is consistent when controlling for various treaty, state, and global level factors that may also influence a state’s decision to ratify.

Under Review

"The Demand (or Lack Thereof) for Honest, Rigorous Impact Information in Charity"

Charities infrequently conduct rigorous evaluations of their impact, and they often treat impact evidence as proprietary. This paper investigates whether donor-driven market incentives can explain why nonprofit organizations routinely lack an evidentiary basis to justify their operations. Across three preregistered online survey experiments (N = 1,058), two domains (global health and human rights), and two types of interventions (medical care and issue-awareness), this paper finds that people do not reward exceptionally positive charitable impact, but they do punish charities that admit their programs were ineffective. Charities are only rewarded for revealing information about their impact when the results are unrealistic and unattainable. The results also demonstrate that donors are more sensitive to information about administrative overhead than they are to direct information about impact. These findings cast doubt on common explanations that suppose charities rarely conduct rigorous impact evaluations due to their costs or difficulty of measurement. 

"Young, Wild, and Academically Free: A Graduate Student Perspective on Academic Freedom" - part of the Symposium on Academic Freedom and the University Campus: Global and Empirical Perspectives

In this short piece, I comment on the causes and consequences of self-censorship in academia from the perspective of an advanced graduate student with training in political science. Self-censorship has intellectual consequences, potentially pre-emptively shutting down nascent areas of inquiry. Research on social movements and opinion expression offers insight into how the social nature of academic communities encourages academics to self-impose constraints on their own research and expression. The tendency to self-censor is understandable as academics are prone to misperceive the beliefs of their peers given preference falsification, the availability heuristic, and the spiral of silence. Self-censorship contributes to the popularity of social norms that weaken academic freedom (and academic risk-taking in general), even if most academics privately support norms of academic freedom and freedom of expression. The solution to the challenge of self-censorship is unlikely to be heavy-handed action against existing university academic staff. Rather, a solution is for academics to stop self-censoring, wherein younger academics are counterintuitively at an advantage. But given the nature of the social dilemma, a more promising solution that receives little discussion is for academics who support academic freedom to hire young, contrarian risk-takers. This outsources the burden of social and professional costs to individuals who have a higher appetite for risk.

Papers in Progress

"Still Ineffective: Revisiting Research on the Conditional Effects of Human Rights NGOs"

Existing statistical studies on the effectiveness of human rights NGOs paint a positive, albeit conditional, effect. Researchers interpret these findings as evidence that HRNGOs in general are conditionally effective. However, this research suffers from four critical problems that cast doubt on this claim. First, replication of the studies demonstrates that when HRNGOs have a statistically significant marginal effect, the effect is more likely to be harmful than positive. Second, diagnostic analysis of the existing studies reveals that the positive findings apply to a very narrow, restricted set of observations (often less than a percent of the overall sample). These observations are often not predicted by the boomerang model to be the most likely cases of effective NGO naming and shaming. Third, the narrow conditional positive effects disappear when updating the models using better measures of respect for human rights or when removing a small number of outlying observations. Fourth, researchers misperceive the distribution of expected NGO outcomes by assuming that most HRNGOs operate at a comparable level of effectiveness. However, human rights observational studies produce evidence consistent with findings from global health and international development that NGO outcomes follow a pareto distribution: most NGOs are ineffective with a small percentage of exceptionally effective NGOs accounting for most welfare gains produced by the NGO sector. A more accurate reading of the statistical studies leads to the conclusion that HRNGOs are not very effective, even conditionally. Because most of the benefits produced by the NGO sector are likely concentrated in a small percentage of NGOs and interventions, researchers must turn to the project-level of analysis – not the country-year level of analysis – to make any reliable claims about HRNGO impact. ​​

"Aversion to the Use of Control Groups in Testing Philanthropic Programs" - with Lucius Caviola (University of Oxford, Harvard University)​​

This paper tests whether people donate less money to nonprofits when they implement randomized trials. We find that people do not have an aversion to randomized trials with no control group. They donate just as much money to a charity that implements a program unilaterally, untested, as they do to a charity that implements a randomized trial to test the comparative effectiveness of two programs. This finding holds across three issue areas: health, education, and human rights. However, we find that people have an aversion to randomized trials with control groups. People donate less money to a charity that implements a randomized controlled trial to test the effectiveness of its program than they do to a charity that implements a program unilaterally, untested. This effect is even stronger in a within-subjects design where the same individual evaluates both types of charities.

​Watching the Watchdogs - with Michael Spagat (Royal Holloway, University of London)

• ​This project develops a methodology to assess the quality of human rights reporting of conflict trends by evaluating reports from three large human rights monitors: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.S. State Department. 

Good Intentions or Good Deeds? Analyzing the Nobel Peace Prize’s Criteria for Rewarding International NGOs - with Barbara Koremenos (University of Michigan)

• This paper analyzes the Nobel Peace Prize’s criteria for rewarding nongovernmental organizations and tests competing theories of third-party responses to altruism and norm compliance. ​ ​​

Public Outreach

“Results of the Justin Amash Subreddit and Discord Survey,” GitHub, May 19, 2020.

"Amnesty International’s travel warning about the U.S. is a mistake," The Washington Post, August 13, 2019

"Fact Checkers Exposed Trump but also Exposed Human Rights Reporting," Political Violence @ a Glance, May 29, 2019
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"The Virtue Economy," Quillette, January 31, 2019