Research

Revise and Resubmit

"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) - R&R at International Studies Quarterly

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. While autocracies exhibit a stronger preference for territorial conquest, we argue that land-orientation affects the behavior of both autocratic and democratic states. 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, regime type, 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.

Under Review

“Do Human Rights Treaty Obligations Matter?” with Wayne Sandholtz, University of Southern California

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.

"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

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

This paper conducts a series of survey experiments across a range of issue areas, testing how individuals change their donations in response to the information that charities reveal about their impact. Information varies from (1) no information about the charity's impact, (2) to information demonstrating positive impact, (3) to information demonstrating ineffective impact, (4) to information demonstrating unrealistically positive impact.
The evidence suggests that charities face mostly down-side to publishing rigorous information about their impact. At best, they would confirm what their donors already believe. More likely though, they would undermine their own claims of having a positive impact and lose donors.
This evidence helps to explain why charities rarely supply rigorous evidence of their impact.

Do Randomized Trials Undermine Charity Fundraising? - with Lucius Caviola (University of Oxford) and Stefan Schubert (University of Oxford)

This paper tests whether individuals have an aversion to experimentation in charity and thereby disincentivize charities to incorporate randomized trials in their evaluation strategies. It also tests whether certain types of randomized trials, such as A/B testing, perform better in terms of fundraising than others, such as randomized controlled trials where some subjects do not receive any treatment. The findings may provide communication solutions for evidence-based nonprofits that want to rigorously evaluate their programs but do not want to lose donors.

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

Existing statistical studies on the effectiveness of human rights NGOs and their activities 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. For example, in one of the most popular studies, one single observation (the USA in 2001) contributes 42% of the weight used to construct the estimate of the effect of HRNGO advocacy on respect for human rights. This means that the estimated coefficient is not representative – it mainly applies to one country in the nominal sample (the United States), not the other 136 countries.
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 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.

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

Revival of “The Work of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch: Evidence from Colombia”
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.

Popular Press Publications

"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

"The Virtue Economy," Quillette, January 31, 2019