Publication: 

Unpacking the Cues : A Survey Experiment on the Impact of International Support for Humanitarian Intervention on U.S. Public (with Joseph M. Grieco and Atsushi Tago). 2020. Kobe Law Journal 53:11-35.

Utilizing a survey experiment centering on a hypothetical proposal by the Trump administration to establish a safe zone in Syria, we seek to contribute to the “unpacking” of international-backing cues and the impact of such cues on individual-level support for the use of military force.  First, we unpack the effect of backing cues from different international bodies, for unlike previous work we distinguish between the impact on respondents of backing from the UN on the one hand and NATO on the other.  Second, we explore the impact of a key pre-disposition of individuals, that is, their confidence in President Trump.  We find that variation in such confidence appears to make American respondents more or less receptive to international-backing cues in a way that differs from previously reported work, namely, the association appears to be curvilinear rather than purely linear. 

A WTO Ruling Matters: Citizens’ Support for the Government’s Compliance with Trade Agreements. 2019. Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy 25(2). DOI: 10.1515/peps-2018-0013.

An international court’s ruling is expected to influence public opinion because of the perception of its legality
and the subsequent costs of noncompliance. However, there has been little direct empirical evidence to support
this claim. To close this lacuna, I conducted a survey experiment to examine the power of a court’s ruling in the context of a trade dispute. The experiment shows that citizens become less supportive of their government’s noncompliance with GATT/WTO agreements when the World Trade Organization issues an adverse ruling, compared to when their government is verbally accused of a violation of the same agreements by a foreign country. However, the experiment also finds that the impact of a ruling is conditional upon the level of compliance of the winner of the dispute.

Negative Surprise in UN Security Council Authorization: Do the UK and French Vetoes Influence the General Public’s Support of US Military Action? (with Atsushi Tago). 2019. in Journal of Peace Research 56(3):395-409. 

Authorization of the use of force by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is believed to increase levels of public support for military action. While scholars have performed sterling research both in theory and empirics on the power of UNSC authorization, there is still much that we do not understand. In particular, we believe that it is necessary to conduct a further study on ‘failed’ authorization cases. As Terrence Chapman points out in his theoretical framework, the general public can derive valuable information based on which of the permanent members of the Council casts a veto; this in turn affects public attitudes towards the use of force. An expected veto cast by the perpetual nay-sayer would not serve as information for the general public. However, if the veto is cast by an allied state of a proposer of the authorizing resolution, the negative vote functions as an information short-cut signaling that the use of force presents a variety of problems, thus reducing public support for the military action. Using online survey experiments, we find supportive evidence for this argument. Our data also suggest that surprising negative information changes the perceptions of legitimacy, legality, public goods, and US interest in a proposed military action, but is unrelated to the perception of costs, casualties or duration.

Measuring Changes in Source of Leader Support: The CHISOLS Dataset (with Michaela Mattes and Brett Ashley Leeds). 2016.  in Journal of Peace Research 52(3): 259-267.

This article introduces the CHISOLS (Change in Source of Leader Support) Dataset, which identifies which leadership changes within countries bring to power a leader whose primary support is drawn from different societal groups than those who supported her predecessor. The dataset covers all countries of the world with populations greater than 500,000 from 1919-2008. We discuss the underlying rationale of our data collection, provide some brief information about the coding rules and procedures, and share some descriptive statistics. We also compare our newly collected data to existing data sources in order to demonstrate the unique contributions that CHISOLS can make to the study of domestically-motivated foreign policy change.

Working Papers:

How Do States Behave in an Overlapping Institutional Environment? PTA Membership and Compliance with WTO Rulings 

This paper examines how states’ memberships in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) affect their trade dispute settlement behaviors at the World Trade Organization (WTO). I argue that PTA memberships change the costs associated with how states settle disputes at the WTO. Specifically, if a defendant is in the middle of PTA negotiations with a WTO member state(s), this institutional environment raises the defendant’s cost of non-compliance with WTO rulings. Non-cooperative behaviors at the WTO would reveal the defendant as an unreliable PTA partner, which may protract ongoing PTA negotiations and delay ratification. Empirical analysis of the defendant’s compliance with WTO rulings (1995 to 2010) reveals that the increasing number of PTA negotiations that the defendant has had at the time of the ruling dramatically reduces its time to compliance, even after accounting for the selection of dispute escalation and the endogeneity of defendant’s participation in PTAs to its dispute behavior at the WTO.

The Effects of Foreign Audiences in WTO Litigation

This paper develops a theory that states use IOs to influence domestic groups in other IO member states by providing information. Examining dispute settlements at the World Trade Organization (WTO), I argue that a complainant state may have an incentive to use WTO litigation to inform pro-trade domestic groups in a respondent state of their own government’s protectionist policies that harm their economic interests, and thus mobilizing them to act. However, to what extent domestic groups influence government policies depends on domestic conditions. I hypothesize that　the plaintiff may wait to bring a dispute case until the respondent’s leadership shifts in a favorable policy preference direction, especially when a leadership change is accompanied by changes in the leader’s support coalition. Empirical analyses of trade dispute initiations at the WTO (1995-2008) reveal that a complainant is more likely to litigate a WTO　dispute when there is a change in the leader’s support coalition in the defendant state.

Leadership Turnover and the Initiation of Investment Dispute Arbitration

This paper investigates the timing of when investors use international arbitration by focusing on their expectation about policy change in host-countries. I argue that leadership turnovers accompanied by changes in leaders’ societal support provide a window of opportunity for policy change and therefore rectifying BIT violations. While national leaders tend to break BITs to protect the interests of their own constituencies, new leaders may place less emphasis on protecting those constituencies of previous leaders. Accordingly, the entry of new leaders who are supported by different constituencies from those of old leaders increases the likelihood that violations will be rectified, which in turn, encourages investors to use international arbitration courts. This hypothesis is empirically tested using newly collected data about investor-country disputes brought to the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes from 1960 to 2011.