Domestic law and human rights treaty commitments: The Convention against Torture

How human rights treaties will be incorporated and applied domestically must affect how eager states will be to ratify those treaties. This article focuses on two characteristics of domestic legal systems that shape the relationship between international law and domestic law: whether treaties are directly incorporated into domestic law and whether treaties can override ordinary statute. The analysis probes two arguments as to why domestic legal institutions influence ratification decisions, one emphasizing the potential costs associated with ratification and the other emphasizing congruence between domestic values and treaty norms. Survival analysis of ratification of the Convention against Torture reveals that both judicial independence and making treaties equal or superior to statute increase the likelihood of ratification, which is consistent with the norm-congruence thesis. The results suggest new avenues for investigating the relationships between human rights treaties and domestic legal institutions.     

Environmental cooperation: ratifying second-best agreements

As an alternative to the environmental cartel approach, we assume that an international environmental agreement aims simply at providing a collective response to a perceived threat. Given this less demanding concept of cooperation and considering that most treaties become enforceable only after ratification by a sufficient number of participants, we examine the set of self-enforceable agreements. This set contains first-best but also second-best agreements that do not maximize the collective welfare of members but meet environmental and/or participative requirements. We study the properties of this set and discuss admissible values of targets and thresholds that favour economics over environmental objectives and vice versa.     

Economic performance and U.S. Senate elections: A comment

This paper investigates the issue of economic performance and U.S. Senate elections analyzed by Bennett and Wiseman (1991) in a work published in this journal. Our study analyzes the electoral margins and election outcomes of U.S. Senate elections using state-level data involving only incumbents up for reelection in the 1976–1990 period (212 elections). The ordinary least squares and logit estimation results suggest that the effects of economic performance variables on incumbent senatorial elections are in general overshadowed by other factors known to be important in determining electoral margins and outcomes. In addition, the empirical results of the entire model are in general consistent with prior findings noted in the public choice and political science literature concerning the analysis of U.S. Senate elections. Therefore, we suggest that the findings raised in our study provide enough theoretical and empirical evidence to raise sufficient doubt regarding the robustness of the results suggested by Bennett and Wiseman (1991), and thus call upon other researchers to study further the relationship between economic performance and voting behavior in U.S. Senate elections.     

Elections and Democratization in Authoritarian Regimes

When do elections in authoritarian regimes lead to democracy? Building from the distinction between competitive and hegemonic authoritarian regimes, I argue that presence of relatively weaker incumbents renders competitive authoritarian elections more prone to democratization, but only when domestic and international actors choose to actively pressure the regime. The effects of two forms of pressure—opposition electoral coalitions and international conditionality—are theorized. Propositions are tested using a comprehensive dataset of elections in authoritarian regimes from 1990 to 2007. Results support two core claims: that the effect of electoral pressure is conditional on the type of authoritarianism and that this greater vulnerability to pressure is the reason why competitive authoritarian elections are more likely to lead to democracy. In contrast, several alternative explanations—that differences across regime type are explained by alternation in power, better electoral conduct, or ongoing processes of liberalization—are not supported by the evidence.     

External dimensions of European environmental policy: An analysis of environmental treaty ratification by third states

The European Union has become an important leader in international environmental affairs – particularly through the negotiation of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) with favourable terms. In this article, EU environmental leadership is studied from a new perspective, focusing on the ratification stage of environmental regime formation. Specifically, it investigates whether the EU is also capable of motivating third states to join its preferred MEAs. It is argued that third states join the EU's preferred MEAs to signal their compliance with EU environmental standards in an effort to become eligible for various rewards that the EU could potentially offer, including a credible membership perspective, access to its lucrative markets, and aid and assistance. The argument is tested by examining the ratification behaviour of 25 non‐EU Member States with regard to all 21 MEAs negotiated under the auspices of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). The results provide robust support for the theory that EU rewards motivate third states to ratify these treaties. The results withstand a number of statistical tests, even when alternative explanatory factors such as trade intensities, transnational communication and geographic proximity are controlled for. The study is the first large‐scale demonstration of the EU's external influence at the ratification stage of environmental regime formation. By identifying three different channels of EU influence, the research permits a more refined understanding of the EU's role as a promoter of environmental protection standards.     

Dynamic Responsiveness in the U.S. Senate

I develop a theory of dynamic responsiveness that suggests that parties that win elections choose candidates who are more extreme and parties that lose elections choose candidates who are more moderate. Moreover, the size of past victories matters. Close elections yield little change, but landslides yield larger changes in the candidates offered by both parties. I test this theory by analyzing the relationship between Republican vote share in U.S. Senate elections and the ideology of candidates offered in the subsequent election. The results show that Republican (Democratic) victories in past elections yield candidates who are more (less) conservative in subsequent elections, and the effect is proportional to the margin of victory. This suggests that parties or candidates pay attention to past election returns. One major implication is that parties may remain polarized in spite of their responsiveness to the median voter .     

Presidential Power over Supreme Court Decisions

I calculate U.S. presidents’ power and power use concerning the ideological direction of U.S. Supreme Court decisions through their ability to appoint replacements to the Court, over the period 1946 through 2001. I test hypotheses concerning factors affecting appointment power and power use, and examine their effect on Senate confirmation votes. Of nine presidents, four have had the ability to affect the direction of more than 25 percent of Court decisions for sustained periods of time. Strongly ideological power use in appointment is found for four also. Senate confirmation votes have tended to be more favorable when the president has more appointment power.     

Governance Delegation Agreements: Shared Sovereignty as a Substitute for Limited Statehood

Governance delegation agreements—international treaties allowing external actors legal authority within host states for fixed terms—succeed in simple and, under certain conditions, complex state‐building tasks. These deals are well institutionalized and have input legitimacy because ratification requires sufficient domestic support from a ruling coalition. In order to obtain that input legitimacy, however, host states constrain external actors commensurate with their level of statehood: Stronger states delegate less legal authority. This article argues that these constraints, which produce joint rather than complete authority, require external actors to work within state structures rather than substituting for them, and thus make coordination of complex tasks more difficult. A quantitative overview of data on consent‐based peacekeeping missions complements a qualitative analysis focused on comparative case studies in Melanesia and Central America to test the theory. The results support the theory and suggest that these deals hold promise particularly for accomplishing complex tasks in especially weak states.     

A Spatial Model of U.S. Senate Elections

The importance of primaryelections is considered within the contextof U.S. Senate elections where senatorsserve overlapping terms and voters areassumed to balance their two senatorsagainst each other. Voters behavestrategically in the primaries butconvergence to the median position is notachieved except as a knife-edge result.More generally, constraints in the partyspace prevent the party of the sittingsenator from obtaining the median'spreference allowing the opposition party tonominate a candidate further away from themedian while still capturing the medianvoter. Empirical evidence supports thenotion that senate divergence is a functionof the state primary system.     

U.S.-China Space Cooperation: Balancing Act between the U.S. Congress and President

There are a growing number of U.S. space scientists and managers calling for reinitiating cooperation with China in space. It is well-known that investigations of the U.S. Congress into various allegations involving China have resulted in a series of laws curtailing space cooperation between these two countries. By surveying the concurrent political developments within the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, this article attempts to reveal the domestic compulsions that propelled changes in the U.S. space policy towards China. The fundamental impetus is the power struggle and differences between the U.S. president and Congress in their perception of U.S. economic interests and national security in the context of space technology that strained these relations. Recent U.S. presidents who inherited this situation added to the discourse based on their own perceptions about outer space and China. These perceptions either found congruence with the policy of the U.S. Congress or led to finding ways to circumvent its legal restrictions. Based on these developments, it is concluded that the view of the U.S. president has alternated between necessary, desirable, and objectionable on the issue of U.S.-China space cooperation, and the U.S. Congress has thus shifted from supporting to restricting and then legally banning cooperation.     

Structural Change in U.S. Presidents' Use of Force

Has there been a structural change in the way U.S. presidents use force abroad since the nineteenth century? In this article, I investigate historical changes in the use of force by U.S. presidents using Bayesian changepoint analysis. In doing so, I present an integrated Bayesian approach for analyzing changepoint problems in a Poisson regression model. To find the nature of the breaks, I estimate parameters of the Poisson regression changepoint model using Chib's (1998) hidden Markov model algorithm and Frühwirth‐Schnatter and Wagner's (2006) data augmentation method. Then, I utilize transdimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to detect the number of breaks. Analyzing yearly use of force data from 1890 to 1995, I find that, controlling for the effects of the Great Depression and the two world wars, the relationship between domestic conditions and the frequency of the use of force abroad fundamentally shifted in the 1940s.     

Partisanship & nationalization in American elections: Evidence from presidential,senatorial, & gubernatorial elections in the U.S. counties, 1872–2020

Scholars argue that contemporary American elections are pronounced in their degree of partisanship and nationalization. While much of this work largely uncovers a heightened degree of nationalization in contemporary elections, little is known about how far back these patterns generalize. Given the limited availability of American electoral data, this work also generally focuses on a single office or during a certain segment of the post-war period since 1946. Moreover, this work largely focuses on states as salient units of analysis, masking potential variation found in U.S. counties, the smallest geographical unit constituting panel observations over time and across elections. In this note, we leverage a novel dataset of county-level election returns for President, U.S. Senate, and Governor, to specify a model assessing whether American elections are more nationalized and partisan than during any other period since the Civil War. We find evidence that presidential and Senate elections are more partisan today than any period since the Civil War, while gubernatorial elections are as partisan today as they were during the late 1800s. Our findings have implications for contemporary-based theories explaining the rise of partisanship in American elections and demonstrates the utility of county-level data in assessing electoral changes in America.     

Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections?

In spite of substantial public controversy, very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections. Although such participation is a violation of election laws in most parts of the United States, enforcement depends principally on disclosure of citizenship status at the time of voter registration. This study examines participation rates by non-citizens using a nationally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants. We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections. Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress.     

Negotiated settlements and peace referendums

Institutional innovations in conflict management have received considerable academic attention in the past decades. Yet few studies have considered the design of referendums in peace processes and the role of popular mandates in catalysing negotiated settlements. Drawing evidence from divided societies, particularly the contrasting cases of South Africa and Cyprus, the article points to the importance of ratification sequence and early mandate referendums. Specifically, it demonstrates how mandate referendums focusing initially on domestic constituencies enable leaders to pre‐empt ethnic outbidding challenges while concluding a peace agreement. An early ratification process could safeguard the peace process from unavoidable reversals in public opinion, increase flexibility as to the timing of critical decisions and maximise the credibility of leaders aiming for a negotiated settlement. The study of mandate referendums has important implications for broader research on international mediations since it suggests mechanisms by which political actors could ensure the ratification of significant treaties in global or regional politics.     

Experiential Learning and Presidential Management of the U.S. Federal Bureaucracy: Logic and Evidence from Agency Leadership Appointments

Presidents become increasingly effective at managing the bureaucracy because of the information and expertise that they acquire from on‐the‐job experience. In their appointment choices, this theory predicts that presidents become better at reducing information asymmetries incurred from the bureaucracy (Agent Selection Learning), improve the vertical balance of leadership agent traits between top supervisory positions and subordinates directly beneath them (Agent Monitoring Learning), and place a greater relative premium on loyalty in response to horizontal policy conflict between the White House and the Senate (Common Agency Learning). This logic obtains empirical support from the analysis of bureaucratic agent traits for Senate‐confirmed presidential appointees serving in leadership positions covering 39 U.S. federal government agencies from 1977 to 2009. Presidents’ appointment strategies reflect their increasing effectiveness at managing the bureaucracy, thus complementing their increasing reliance on administrative mechanisms to achieve policy objectives as their tenure in office rises.     

Analyzing the turnout-competition link with aggregate cross-sectional data

Numerous papers by Public Choice oriented scholars and others have sought to test the hypothesis inspired by Downs (1957) that, ceteris paribus, turnout should be higher when elections are close. Most look in cross-sectional terms at variations in turnout at the constituency level for elections of a given type. By and large the results have been disappointing (see, e.g., Foster, 1984). We are skeptical of these weak findings and argue that a complete portrait of the turnout-competition link requires us to examine that link for at least three different types of turnout (turnout among potential eligibles, turnout among registrants, and turnout for a given office relative to other offices such as top of the ticket), and to take into account longitudinal changes in turnout. For recent off-year elections to the U.S. Senate and also for off-year elections to the U.S. House of Representatives in states where there was no gubernatorial or senatorial contest on the ballot, we find strong evidence for higher turnout among eligibles in close contests. For these elections to the U.S. Senate we also find evidence for an ecological effect that leads to turnout being maximized at values of competition other than 50–50. Moreover, when we look at turnout for office relative to top of the ticket voting in the California Assembly and the U.S. Senate in presidential years, we again find some evidence for an ecological effect in which turnout is maximized at a value of Republican vote share above 50 percent and find further strong evidence for a clear link between competition and turnout for office among those at the polls.     

Legislative Veto Players and the Effects of International Human Rights Agreements

Do national legislatures constitute a mechanism by which commitments to international human rights treaties can be made credible? Treaty ratification can activate domestic mechanisms that make repression more costly, and the legislative opposition can enhance these mechanisms. Legislative veto players raise the cost of formalistic repressive strategies by declining to consent to legislation. Executives can still choose to rely on more costly, extralegal strategies, but these could result in severe penalties for the leader and require the leader to expend resources to hide. Especially in treaty member‐states, legislatures can use other powers to also increase the cost of extralegal violations, which can further reduce repression. By using an empirical strategy that attempts to address the selection effects in treaty commitment decisions, I show that positive effects of human rights treaties increase when there are more legislative veto players.     

American agriculture and trade policymaking: Two-level bargaining in the North American Free Trade Agreement

This paper has employed Putnam's two-level bargaining framework to analyze the negotiations leading to the North American Free Trade Agreement. The particular focus has been on agricultural aspects of the negotiations between the U.S. and Mexico, identifying the distribution of coalitions and preferences across the U.S. polity that influenced the drafting and ultimate ratification of the agreement. Special emphasis has been given to how the negotiations were influenced by the intersecting of agricultural interests and strategies at both domestic and international levels.     

Which Way to U.S. Climate Cooperation? Issue Linkage versus a U.S.‐Based Agreement

Several scholars have suggested that the United States can be compelled to reengage in the Kyoto process by linking cooperation on climate change to cooperation on trade or technology research and development. We argue that such issue linkage would likely fail and suggest that a more promising road to U.S. cooperation is to develop an alternative climate agreement based on federal U.S. climate policy. However, the question then becomes whether the Kyoto countries might be prepared to abandon the Kyoto process in favor of such a U.S.‐based agreement. We argue that if a U.S.‐based agreement were to be built on President Bush's current climate policy, the Kyoto countries (especially the European Union) would likely be reluctant to go along. However, if a U.S.‐based agreement were to be built on the many Kyoto‐like initiatives now emerging at state and local levels, the Kyoto countries might well be more favorably inclined.     

The Intersection of Redistricting,Race, and Participation

The drawing of congressional district lines can significantly reduce political participation in U.S. House elections, according to recent work. But such studies have failed to explain which citizens’ voting rates are most susceptible to the dislocating effects of redistricting and whether the findings are generalizable to a variety of political contexts. Building on this nascent literature and work on black political participation, we show that redistricting's negative effects on participation—measured by voter roll‐off in U.S. House elections—are generally strongest among African Americans, but that black voters can be mobilized when they are redrawn into a black representative's congressional district. Our findings, based on data from 11 postredistricting elections in five states from 1992 through 2006, both expand the empirical scope of previous work and suggest that redistricting plays a previously hidden role in affecting black participation in congressional contests.