Research
Draft manuscripts are available upon request.
Peer-reviewed Publications:
“Deterring Threat and Settling Scores: How Coups Influence Respect for Human Rights”
(with Travis Curtice, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 2019)
We argue political uncertainty from coups decreases respect for human rights. Post-coup regimes preemptively repress as a show of strength to deter threats from those excluded from power and settle scores through cycles of retaliation. Additionally, we argue the retaliation cycle of score settling will last longer after a failed coup because of informational problems that emerge when targeting opponents. Employing data on coups and physical integrity rights from 1980 to 2015, we find coup failure and success are negatively associated with respect for physical integrity rights, and the cycle of retaliation lasts longer after failed coups.
“Human Rights Violations and Violent Internal Conflict”
(With David Cingranelli, Skip Mark, Mark Gibney, Peter Haschke and Reed Wood, Social Sciences, 2019)
This research project uses econometric methods and comparative, cross-national data to see whether violations of human rights increase the likelihood of the onset or escalation of violent protest, terrorism and/or civil war. The findings show that these types of violent internal conflict will occur and escalate if governments: (1) torture, politically imprison, kill, or “disappear” people, (2) do not allow women to participate fully in the political system, including allowing them to hold high level national political office, and (3) do not allow women to participate fully in the economic life of the nation by ensuring equal pay for equal work, by encouraging their entry to the highest paid occupations, and by protecting them from sexual harassment at their workplaces. These types of violations of human rights and the existence of large horizontal inequalities in societies independently produce an increased risk of the onset and escalation of many forms of violent internal conflict. The results also provide some evidence for the argument that there is a trade-off between liberty and security.
“What Bias? Changing Standards, Information Effects, and Human Rights Measurement”
(with Peter Haschke, Forthcoming at Journal of Human Rights, 2019)
Human rights measurement efforts have been confronted with concerns of bias practically since quantitative measurement efforts began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By and large, attacks have focused on biases to the source materials on which these measurement efforts rely – namely the annual human rights reports produced by Amnesty International and the U.S. Department of State. We here take stock and seek to distinguish conceptually distinct types of bias that have been conflated in the past, yet plausibly affect human rights measures. In addition to revisiting reporting bias or organizational bias long identified in the literature, we also disentangle two types of bias that have been of concern more recently – bias attributable to changing standards and information effects. For each type of bias we identify, we provide an empirical implication as to the effect on human rights measures and importantly its spatial or temporal variation.
(Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2018)
Religion has become multi-faceted in its influence on political attitudes, and religious denomination is no longer its only best predictor. While this has largely been demonstrated at the constituency level, few studies have demonstrated that this association holds for members of Congress (MC’s) as well. The question this study seeks to answer is whether religion also influences MC’s political voting behavior despite the additional constraints they face such as being responsive to their constituents demands, their partisan alignment and their personal ideology. In this study I empirically estimate the associations between a MC’s multi-faceted religion – the saliency of senators’ religion, the denomination they belong to and their religious theology – and the political positions of U.S. senators on economic, social and foreign policy issues. I find that each of these elements independently influences senatorial positions, even when controlling for the size of their religious constituencies, the importance the constituency places on religion and the senators’ political ideology
Working Papers:
Contentious Politics:
“‘Violence on Many Sides’ – Framing Effects on Protest and Support for Repression”
(with Pearce Edwards, invited to Revise and Resubmit at British Journal of Political Science)
The success of protests depends on whether they favorably affect public opinion: nonviolent resistance can win public support for a movement and decrease support for a repressive regime, yet violent resistance does not. We argue public perception of whether a protest is violent shifts based on distinctions in the types of action and the identities of participants in those actions. Our framework accounts for the (1) threat of harm, (2) bearing of arms , and (3) identity of protesters. Using survey experiments – one in Israel and one in the United States – we find support for the proposed framework. Threat of harm has the greatest positive effect on perceptions of violence and support for repression. Surprisingly, social out-groups are not perceived as more violent, but respondents favor repressing them anyway. The findings provide key evidence for the link between contentious action and public opinion, and demonstrate the susceptibility of this link to framing, especially through manipulating the identity of the participants.
“Radicalizing Alone – Are ‘Lone Wolves’ Political Entrepreneurs or Aggrieved Avengers?”
Should we consider Lone-Wolf attacks as a strategic organization-less means of committing political violence, or is it simply idiosyncratic and personal? If these are in fact strategic, this presents a puzzle – how can an individual further political goals using violence alone? I argue that strategic lone-wolves are political entrepreneurs who use an innovative tactic to mobilize like-minded individuals around a shared cause. The attacks serve a dual purpose – as a communication platform, in lieu of any organizational capacity and the more trivial pursuit of challenging the state through violent means. These are more likely to occur in the presence of capable counter-violence measures by the state which successfully prevent violent mobilization. As such these attacks will occur as a result of both personal and national grievances caused by the political adversary, and will focus on targets with explicit political meaning, especially during periods of heightened political contention. I test this theory on the universe of individual attacks committed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 2015-2016. I construct a unique dataset, at the locality-day level for this period, in which I identify over 225 attacks which were committed by unaffiliated individuals. I find that personal grievances serve as the primary motivator for committing lone-wolf attacks, but these are mediated by the necessity to communicate to other like-minded individuals and the national political environment.
Human Rights Measurement:
“Are Human Rights Standards Really Changing? Testing the ‘Changing Standards of Accountability’ Assumption”
(with Baekkwan Park and Peter Haschke, under review)
Has the state of human rights across the world, on average, improved or remained constant? Human rights scholars have been debating this question by asking whether the standards-based data which is used in quantitative work on human rights have been consistent, or whether systematic bias in the measures have led to skewed views on the condition of human rights. We enter this debate by directly testing the assumption of “changing standards of accountability” which argues that the reports themselves, which serve as the foundation of standards-based indicators, have become longer and include better information about violations. Using supervised learning algorithms, we mimic the data-generating-process of standards-based measures and automate the coding process from the content of the reports which human coders have “translated” into human rights scores. We find that the underlying texts have systematically changed over time leading to some bias in the coding procedure. Specifically, we find that the standards of accountability in the reports have changed for torture and political imprisonment, while political killings and disappearances have maintained a constant standard over time.
“Understanding Bias in Human Rights Measurement – the Case of Human Trafficking”
(with Rachel Harmon and Baekkwan Park, under review)
The literature on human rights measurements has established two potential sources of bias. The first is political biases in reports, which are amended to comply with the interests of the reporting agency. The second is the hanging standards of accountability – where more information and increased budgets change the standard to which countries are held over time. Current literature focusing on physical integrity violations finds that changing standards are the main source of bias in reports. In this paper, we examine whether and which of these biases influence a different set of reports and
scores. To combat human trafficking, the US State Department (SD) issues an annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report and score for each country based on its responses to human trafficking. As opposed to other country-level human rights indicators, the State Department issues both reports and scores and these are directly tied to financial and political consequences which may result in attempts to influence the scores based on political interests. Using a supervised machine learning algorithm we examine whether the scores are biased, and disentangle whether its source is the changing standards or political biases. We find that as opposed to other human rights indicators, the TIP scores are more influenced by political biases than changing standards.
Religion and Politics:
“Who Benefits from Religious Exemptions? The Politics of RLUIPA Cases in U.S. Federal Courts”
(with Ben Hertzberg and Kirsten Widner)
In contemporary American political controversy about religion, the question of religious exemptions is a key site of debate. Such exemptions inspire normative, legal, and empirical controversy. Some argue that laws granting religious exemptions merely serve to entrench the power and prejudice of religious majorities. Since U.S. laws like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) do not specify a precise definition of religion, they leave a great deal of determination of whether a plaintiff’s claim counts as religious or not to the courts’ discretion. On one hand, many believe that institutional and secularist biases about what phenomena count as religious mar the courts’ adjudication of plaintiffs’ claims. As a result, these scholars allege, legislation providing for religious exemptions conceals a majoritarian bias. In contrast, others claim that religious exemptions are crucial to addressing long-standing biases in American law and institutions.The status quo in such institutions, then—even if participants think of them as “secular” rather than “Protestant” or “religious”—favors those with Protestant cultural backgrounds or whose beliefs and commitments appear as recognizably religious to those with such backgrounds. We adjudicate this controversy by constructing two new data sets, the first from the universe of all federal appellate court cases adjudicated under RLUIPA from its enactment in 2000 until 2015 and the second from a random sample of the RLUIPA district court cases adjudicated during the same time period. These data vindicate the claims of those scholars who argue that religious exemptions are a tool for adherents of minority religions to renegotiate laws and policies that burden their ability to follow their commitments.