The Conditional Nature of Political Risk: How Home Institutions Influence the Location of Foreign Direct Investment

What determines whether countries' institutions attract or deter investment? Although existing theories predict that multinational enterprises (MNEs) avoid locations where institutions cannot constrain public and private actors' opportunistic behavior, we argue host institutions' attractiveness depends on firms' home environment. Home country institutions shape firms' practices and capabilities, thus helping to determine the environments that firms are best prepared to face abroad. We test our predictions using multiple data sets at different levels of analysis: firm‐level data on MNEs' foreign subsidiaries, data on bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI) positions, and longitudinal data on bilateral FDI flows. We find that states with independent judiciaries are particularly attractive to investment from countries also possessing independent courts. Similarly, countries with low judicial independence disproportionately send FDI to countries lacking independent judiciaries. These findings' implications challenge conventional wisdom: “Good” institutions may not attract all investors, and “bad” institutions may not always deter, as current research suggests.     

Portraying Those We Condemn with Care: Extending the Ethics of Representation

The study of crime’s images is an increasingly important endeavour. In this paper I seek to understand the impact of an image of a criminal child (the outcomes and consequences that have stemmed from its display) by examining its affect (its capacity to engage its viewers). I demonstrate how the image’s meaning emerged from encounters with both the content and the format of the image, as well as from the context in which these encounters occurred. I will demonstrate that the impacts from this image went beyond what was necessary to punish, and propose that an ethics of representation is extended to include images of the condemned. For some population groups, this extension can mitigate the influence of fantasies about criminal ‘others’ that may come into play when pictures of them are viewed.     

The CIA and congressional oversight: learning and forgetting lessons

Organizations both learn lessons and forget lessons. A lesson said to be learned by the CIA as a result of the negative reaction of congressional overseers to its interrogation program was the need to create opportunities to provide information and interact with them. The historical record shows that this was a lesson already learned. Why then the need to relearn it? It is suggested here that organizational forgetfulness may be triggered by the same factors which promote learning: perceived problems with organizational performance, opportunities to act, and people.     

Staggered Terms for the US Senate: Origins and Irony

This article provides the first detailed study of the origins of staggered Senate terms, which typically have been interpreted as part of the framers’ intent to create an insulated, stable, and conservative Senate. I draw upon three sources of evidence—the meaning and application of “rotation” in revolutionary America, the deliberations and decisions at the Constitutional Convention, and the arguments during Ratification—to show that the origins of and intentions behind staggered terms offer little support for the dominant interpretation. Instead, staggered terms, a mechanism to promote “rotation” or turnover of membership, were added to the Constitution as a compromise to offset, not augment, the Senate's longer terms by exposing a legislative chamber with long individual tenure to more frequent electoral influence and change.