Refereed Articles

Hierarchy and Differentiation in International Regime Complexes: A Theoretical Framework for Comparative Research (with C. Randall Henning). Review of International Political Economy 30:6, 2178-2205 (2023).

• This article provides the introduction and theoretical framework for the RIPE Special Issue on International Regime Complexity

The concept of international regime complexity offers a useful lens for examining the increasing density of international institutions in global governance. A growing literature in International Political Economy (IPE) identifies clusters of overlapping institutions in many important policy areas, yet some scholars argue that complexity undermines governance effectiveness, while others perceive distinct advantages over unified institutions. To bring coherence to these findings, we present a general theoretical framework that characterizes regime complexes based on two structural features: Authority relations and institutional differentiation. These dimensions jointly determine the opportunities and constraints that states and other actors confront as they navigate institutional rules. As a result, they shape important outcomes, such as policy adjustment, regime shifting and competitive regime creation. The article proposes testable hypotheses regarding the effects of authority and differentiation, and we assess their correspondence with the eight regime complexes examined by the five companion articles in this special issue. We further identify a set of dynamic processes that shape the evolution of regime complexes over time. Our framework strengthens the foundation for comparative analysis of regime complexes and charts a new agenda for the research program.

Value Differentiation, Policy Change, and Cooperation in International Regime Complexes. Review of International Political Economy 30:6, 2206-2232(2023).

• Part of RIPE Special Issue on International Regime Complexity

In many issue areas in international political economy, interstate cooperation is governed by a dense network of distinct but overlapping international institutions. Whether this environment of “regime complexity” strengthens or undermines cooperation is a subject of intense debate. Some argue that overlapping institutions enhance legitimacy and flexibility, while others claim that opportunistic forum shopping en- ables state to escape compliance with rigorous rules. This paper reconciles this debate, demonstrating that regime complexity has contrasting effects depending on the degree of value differentiation among institutions. In issue areas where undifferentiated in- stitutions function as substitutes, forum shopping will reduce the regime’s ability to discipline state behavior. However, in issue areas where institutions are differentiated by value—i.e., the benefits they provide increase as rules become more rigorous— institutional overlap can increase policy change among states. I demonstrate these dynamics formally and provide empirical evidence in a comparative analysis of the regime complexes for election observation and forest-related carbon offsets.

Strategies of Contestation: International Law, Domestic Audiences, and Image Management (with Julia Morse). The Journal of Politics 84.4 (2022).

• 2022 Best Article Award, APSA International Collaboration Section

International relations scholars frequently argue that violations of international law generate political costs for governments. Yet we know little about whether governments can evade responsibility for non-compliance, which may be a low-salience issue for domestic audiences. We propose a theory of image management whereby leaders strategically contest international law violations to influence citizen perceptions of the government. Drawing on communications scholarship, we disaggregate government image into four underlying dimensions: morality, performance, lawfulness, and allegiance. A government’s response to violations is designed to influence the dimensions of image valued by their political coalition. We develop a typology of response strategies and test their effects in a survey experiment examining violations of the torture, trade, and chemical weapons regimes. Our results offer fresh insights for compliance scholarship. Governments can mitigate backlash and leverage allegations of non-compliance for political ends, but their strategies are constrained by the foreign policy preferences of supporters.

Dynamic Stochastic Blockmodel Regression for Network Data: Application to International Militarized Conflicts (with Santiago Olivella and Kosuke Imai). Journal of the American Statistical Association (2022).

The decision to engage in military conflict is shaped by many factors, including state- and dyad-level characteristics as well as the state’s membership in geopolitical coalitions. Supporters of the democratic peace theory, for example, hypothesize that the community of democratic states is less likely to wage war with each other. Such theories explain the ways in which nodal and dyadic characteristics affect the evolution of conflict patterns over time via their effects on group memberships. To test these arguments, we develop a dynamic model of network data by combining a hidden Markov model with a mixed-membership stochastic blockmodel that identifies latent groups underlying the network structure. Unlike existing models, we incorporate co- variates that predict dynamic node memberships in latent groups as well as the direct formation of edges between dyads. While prior substantive research often assumes the decision to engage in international militarized conflict is independent across states and static over time, we demonstrate that conflict is driven by states’ evolving membership in geopolitical blocs. Our analysis of militarized disputes from 1816–2010 identifies two distinct blocs of democratic states, only one of which exhibits unusually low rates of conflict. Changes in monadic covariates like democracy shift states between coalitions, making some states more pacific but others more belligerent.

Angling for Influence: Institutional Proliferation in Development Banking. International Studies Quarterly, Volume 65, Issue 1 (2021), Pages 95-108.

Why do states build new international organizations (IOs) in issue areas where many institutions already exist? Prevailing theories of institutional creation emphasize their ability to resolve market failures, but adding new IOs can increase state uncertainty and rule inconsistency. I argue that institutional proliferation can be explained by the failure of existing IOs to adapt to shifts in the distribution of state power. States expect decision-making rules within IOs to reflect their material power; when it does not, they construct new organizations that provide them with greater institutional control. To test this argument, I examine the proliferation of multilateral development banks since 1944. I leverage a natural experiment rooted in the allocation of World Bank votes at Bretton Woods to show that the probability of institutional proliferation is higher when power is misaligned in existing institutions. My results suggest that conflict over shifts in global power contribute to the fragmentation of global governance.

The Forces of Attraction: How Security Interests Shape Membership in Economic Institutions (with Christina Davis). Review of International Organizations (2020)

The interconnection of economic exchange and security politics is widely recognized. But when and how much do geopolitical interests matter for economic cooperation? Existing work focuses on bilateral trade and aid, overlooking other channels of influence. In a study of multilateral economic organizations, we demonstrate that substantial discrimination occurs during the accession process as states share benefits with favored partners while excluding others. This biased selection of members allows states to politicize economic cooperation despite multilateral norms of non-discrimination. We test the geopolitical origins of institutional membership by analyzing membership patterns for 252 economic organizations from 1948 – 2014. Evidence shows that security ties shape which states join and remain in organizations at both the formation and enlargement stages. We use a finite mixture model to compare the relative power of economic and geopolitical considerations, finding that geopolitical alignment accounts for about half of the membership decisions in economic institutions.

Deference and Hierarchy in International Regime Complexes. International Organization, vol. 72, no. 3 (2018), pp. 561-590. 

How do states resolve jurisdictional conflicts among international institutions? In many issue areas, global governance is increasingly fragmented among multiple international organizations (IOs). Existing work argues this fragmentation can undermine cooperation as different institutions adopt conflicting rules. However, this perspective overlooks the potential for interinstitutional coordination. I develop a theory of institutional deference: the acceptance of another IO's exercise of authority. By accepting rules crafted in another IO, member states can mitigate rule conflict and facilitate a division of labor within the regime complex. I use an original data set of over 2,000 IO policy documents to describe patterns of deference in the counterterrorism, intellectual property, and election-monitoring regime complexes. Empirical tests support two theoretical claims. First, institutional deference is indeed associated with a division of labor among institutions: IOs that defer to each other are more likely to focus their rule-making efforts on separate subissues. Second, deference is a strategic act that is shaped both by efficiency concerns and power politics. Statistical tests confirm that deference is used to efficiently pool resources among disparate organizations, and that IOs with weaker member states tend to defer to organizations with more powerful members.

Book Chapters

“The Democratic Peace Debate” (with Joanne Gowa). In The Causes of Peace: What We Now Know, ed. Asle Toje and Bard Nikolas Vik Steen (2019).

“Membership Patterns in Economic Institutions” (with Christina Davis). In Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations, Princeton University Press (2023).