Sanction Consequences and Citizen Support: A Survey Experiment

Recent research disputes the conventional wisdom that “sanctions do not work.” It demonstrates that states may impose sanctions for purposes beyond seeking an immediate change in the behavior of targeted regimes. For example, democratic leaders often impose sanctions to satisfy their own domestic constituencies. However, we know little about how the consequences of sanctions shape whether or not citizens favor them. Building on insights from prior studies on the use and consequences of sanctions, we develop theoretical expectations regarding the aspects of sanctions that citizens might favor or disfavor. We use these to design and conduct a survey experiment to explore degrees of support for proposed sanctions. We find that on average, citizens support proposed sanctions that they expect will have a long-run impact on the behavior of the targeted state

Treaty Compliance and Violation

International law has enjoyed a recent renaissance as an important subfield of study within international relations. Two trends are evident in the recent literature. First, the obsession with theoretical labels is on the decline. Second, empirical, especially quantitative, work is burgeoning. This article reviews the literature in four issues areas — security, war, and peace; international trade; protection of the environment; and human rights — and concludes we have a much stronger basis for assessing claims about compliance and violation now than was the case only a few years ago. Still, the literature suffers from a few weaknesses, including problems of selection and endogeneity of treaties themselves and an enduring state-centric focus, despite the fact that researchers recognize that nonstate and substate actors influence treaty behavior. Nonetheless, the quality and quantity of new work demonstrates that international law has regained an important place in the study of international politics

Technology and collective action: the effect of cell phone coverage on political violence in Africa

The spread of cell phone technology across Africa has transforming effects on the economic and political sphere of the continent. In this paper, we investigate the impact of cell phone technology on violent collective action. We contend that the availability of cell phones as a communication technology allows political groups to overcome collective action problems more easily and improve in-group cooperation, and coordination. Utilizing novel, spatially disaggregated data on cell phone coverage and the location of organized violent events in Africa, we are able to show that the availability of cell phone coverage significantly and substantially increases the probability of violent conflict. Our findings hold across numerous different model specifications and robustness checks, including cross-sectional models, instrumental variable techniques, and panel data method

Exploring sex differences in attitudes towards the descriptive and substantive representation of women

This article unpacks the rationales that might be behind individual-level support for the idea that there ought to be more women present in political institutions. We outline two distinct rationales: the substantive position that sees an increase in women’s descriptive representation as important in bringing about a subsequent improvement in women’s substantive representation, or the justice-plus position that sees an increase in the descriptive representation of women as important for reasons of justice or other symbolic benefits. We find that women are more likely than men to support an increase in descriptive representation and that women are more likely to hold both the view that an increase in descriptive representation was desirable and that such an increase would improve the representation of women’s political interests. Men are found to be more likely to support an increase in descriptive representation but not relate descriptive representation to substantive representation in any way: the justice-plus rationale