Frames and Consensus Formation in International Relations: The Case of Trafficking in Persons

This article examines the process of consensus formation by the international community regarding how to confront the problem of trafficking in persons. We analyze the corpus of United Nations General Assembly Third Committee resolutions to show that: (1) consensus around the issue of how to confront trafficking in persons has increased over time; and (2) the formation of this consensus depends upon how the issue is framed. We test our argument by examining the characteristics of resolutions’ sponsors and discursive framing concepts such as crime, human rights, and the strength of enforcement language. We conclude that the consensus-formation process in international relations is more aptly described as one of ‘accommodation’ through issue linkage than a process of persuasion

Frames and Consensus Formation in International Relations: The Case of Trafficking in Persons

This article examines the process of consensus formation by the international community regarding how to confront the problem of trafficking in persons. We analyze the corpus of United Nations General Assembly Third Committee resolutions to show that: (1) consensus around the issue of how to confront trafficking in persons has increased over time; and (2) the formation of this consensus depends upon how the issue is framed. We test our argument by examining the characteristics of resolutions’ sponsors and discursive framing concepts such as crime, human rights, and the strength of enforcement language. We conclude that the consensus-formation process in international relations is more aptly described as one of ‘accommodation’ through issue linkage than a process of persuasion

Replication Data for: Historical Legacies of Interethnic Competition: Anti-Semitism and the EU Referendum in Poland

How do historical legacies shape contemporary political outcomes? The article proposes a novel attitudinal mechanism through which distant interethnic competition can influence political preferences in the present. It theorizes that historically conditioned predispositions at the local level can moderate the effects of national-level framing of a policy issue. Using Poland as a test case, I show that subnational variation in support for EU accession was influenced by populist claims about the increase in Jewish influence in the post-accession period. Anti-Semitic cues resonated with voters in areas with historically large Jewish populations and a contentious interethnic past, where latent anti-Semitism persisted throughout the Communist period. To provide evidence for this argument, the article draws on rich historical and contemporary data at the county, town, and individual level of analysis and utilizes novel research methods

Replication Data for: Diversity, Institutions, and Economic Outcomes: Post-WWII Displacement in Poland

The files in this folder reproduce all the tables and figures included in the following article (and the related online appendix): Volha Charnysh. (Forthcoming). "Diversity, Institutions, and Economic Outcomes: Post-WWII Displacement in Poland" American Political Science Review (2019-01-03

Replication data for: The Impact of Politically Motivated Foreign Aid: What is the Evidence?

This paper contributes to the literature on aid and politico-economic development. Several articles have suggested that foreign aid harms growth and political freedoms in recipient countries, particularly when aid is politically motivated. The impact of foreign aid on the United Nations Security Council temporary members is a prime test case, as it is frequently claimed that such aid is politically motivated due to the geopolitical interests of the permanent members and the necessity of building majority coalitions for important Security Council votes. This paper uses instrumental variables and coarsened exact matching to assess the causal impact of foreign aid on GDP growth and democratization in temporary members from 1946 to 2005. We check for robustness by running our specifications on multiply imputed data and conducting K-fold cross validation of our model. Contrary to the recent literature, we find no support for the alleged pernicious effects of aid on growth and political freedoms. In fact, aid substantively increases both GDP growth and democracy scores in temporary members

The Role of Communities in the Transmission of Political Values: Evidence from Forced Population Transfers

Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. This article evaluates the role of community bonds in the long-term transmission of political values. At the end of World War II, Poland's borders shifted westward, and the population from the historical region of Galicia (now partly in Ukraine) was displaced to the territory that Poland acquired from Germany. In a quasi-random process, some migrants settled in their new villages as a majority group, preserving communal ties, while others ended up in the minority. The study leverages this natural experiment of history by surveying the descendants of these Galician migrants. The research design provides an important empirical test of the theorized effect of communities on long-term value transmission, which separates the influence of family and community as two competing and complementary mechanisms. The study finds that respondents in Galicia-majority settlements are now more likely to embrace values associated with Austrian imperial rule and are more similar to respondents whose families avoided displacement

The Death Camp Eldorado: Political and Economic Effects of Mass Violence

This is the replication data for "The Death Camp Eldorado: Political and Economic Effects of Mass Violence