Public and elite opinion on international human rights law: Completing the causal chain of the domestic compliance mechanism

Why do states comply with international human rights law? Scholars have looked to domestic politics to suggest a constituency-driven domestic compliance mechanism. However, it is unclear if strong public support for compliance leads to greater willingness to comply among elected officials. This study is the first to empirically demonstrate the complete causal chain of a constituency-driven domestic compliance mechanism. Using a survey experiment, this study first finds that a strong state commitment to UN Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations (RTNC) increases public support for compliance. Using a parallel lab-in-the-field experiment of sitting legislators, the study then finds that a strong state commitment to RTNC is similarly associated with increased elite support for compliance. Finally, the study finds that public demand for compliance is associated with even greater elite support for compliance. Public demand for compliance seems to elicit elite willingness to comply by raising reputational concerns.     

Are Charitable Giving and Religious Attendance Complements or Substitutes? The Role of Measurement Error

Government policies sometimes cause unintended consequences for other potentially desirable behaviors. One such policy is the charitable tax deduction, which encourages charitable giving by allowing individuals to deduct giving from taxable income. Whether charitable giving and other desirable behaviors are complements or substitutes affect the welfare benefit of the deduction—complements increase the benefit, while substitutes decrease the benefit. This paper focuses on the effect of the deduction on one behavior in particular: religious attendance. Using data from the Independent Sector Survey of Giving and Volunteering, I estimate a tax price elasticity for religious attendance of ?0.4, which implies that charitable giving and religious attendance are complements. I resolve the difference between my estimate and a recent estimate by W. S. Gruber (2004) that implies charitable giving and religious attendance are substitutes. While Gruber imputes itemization status, an important factor in calculating tax incentives, I use survey‐reported itemization status. This imputation creates a large amount of non‐classical measurement error. I show that the measurement error is responsible for the disparate results: If I also impute itemization status, I obtain similar results as Gruber.     

End of an Era? Anti‐Americanism in the Australian Labor Party

Anti‐Americanism, sometimes called the “last acceptable prejudice”, is a common phenomenon in the modern era. This paper explores the ebb and flow of anti‐Americanism in the Australian Labor Party in the post‐Second World War period and argues that while at times it was reasonable or proportionate, at others such criticism became unreasonable, disproportionate and therefore prejudicial. When this occurs the Australia‐US alliance can become strained, the Australian electorate tends to become sceptical of the ALP's credentials on national security and the party's electoral prospects also tend to suffer. Nevertheless, following the brief leadership of the stridently anti‐American Mark Latham, such sentiment in the ALP has been widely discredited and is unlikely to emerge again in its prejudicial form for some time, marking the end of an era.     

Democratization and Political Change as Threats to Collective Sentiments: Testing Durkheim in Russia

Durkheim argued that acute political crises result in increased homicide rates because they pose a threat to sentiments about the collective. Though crucial to Durkheim's work on homicide, this idea remains untested. The authors took advantage of the natural experiment of the collapse of the Soviet Union to examine this hypothesis. Using data from Russian regions (N = 78) and controlling for measures of anomie and other covariates, the authors estimated the association between political change and change in homicide rates between 1991 and 2000. Results indicated that regions exhibiting less support for the Communist Party in 2000 (and thus greater change in political ideals because the Party had previously exercised complete control) were regions with greater increases in homicide rates. Thus, while democratization may be a positive development relative to the Communist juggernaut of the past, it appears that the swift political change in Russia is partially responsible for the higher rates of violence there following the collapse of the Soviet Union.