Coauthored

Most arguments for why women leaders might pursue aggressive policies during interstate conflict emphasize gendered stereotyping of international politics. We highlight a different explanation based on the self selection of certain women into candidacy for leadership positions. To illustrate this mechanism, we conduct a laboratory experiment using online real-time, group play where participants choose to run for election, run a simple campaign, and represent their group in a contest game if elected. We find that women who place a higher non-monetary value on winning were more likely to select into candidacy, win election, and then spend more resources in intergroup contests than their male counterparts. As a result, female leaders pursued more aggressive strategies than male leaders, even though women, on average, tended to invest less in one-on-one contests. These patterns appear even though our protocol stacks the deck against finding gender differences by anonymizing participants and shuffling groups. Our findings emphasize the agency and preferences of female leaders who choose to run and, subsequently, choose to fight harder in intergroup contests.

Can international organizations (IOs) turn the tide of resistance to their authority? We consider a class of IOs bound by the \textit{complementarity} principle: they only act when domestic institutions fail. IOs like the International Criminal Court (ICC) have placed great faith in complementarity as an argument to rally support for international action and spur domestic action. We evaluate the effectiveness of complementarity arguments using the largest global public opinion survey experiment on the ICC to date (N = 10,402). We focus on five countries whose cooperation could be pivotal for the Court: Georgia, Israel, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United States. We find very limited evidence that complementarity arguments improve public support for either ICC investigations or domestic investigations. This suggests complementarity and other pro-IO arguments predicated on democratic procedure or fairness may not restore support for international institutions.

Why do politicians blame offshoring for job losses when automation is also a culprit? Why have voters responded to automation and offshoring shocks by demanding a retreat from globalization but not transfers to the unemployed? We propose that both questions are explained by the collision of economic nationalism and comparative advantage trade. Economic nationalists, who dislike vulnerability and imports, oppose policies that hamper their own state's comparative advantage industries, like regulations of high-tech automation. They are more comfortable with tariffs restricting imports. In the United States, which has a comparative advantage in the production of capital intensive automation technologies, this effect undercuts the willingness of voters to support policies that would protect jobs by regulating automation. Opportunistic politicians emphasize offshoring because economic nationalist voters support limiting imports but are conflicted in their support for limiting automation. We develop a formal model of a citizen's demand for policy in response to economic dislocation, where citizens form preferences over redistribution plans and a policy response that blunts dislocation (like a tariff or a restriction on automation). The source (foreign versus domestic) and type (labor versus automation) of a shock affects the preferred weights citizens place on each policy. We test the model’s predictions with a survey experiment fielded in the United States. Consistent with expectations, domestic automation shocks increase the weight respondents place on redistribution versus a regulatory response, while globalization shocks place much heavier weight on regulatory (tariff) responses. Altering the source of each shock - by emphasizing foreign-produced automation technology or within-country labor relocation - reweights responses towards regulations in the former case and redistribution in the latter case. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the political consequences of the current populist moment as well as give predictions about how the tide of popular sentiment could turn against automation.

We conduct a large scale replication exercise to reproduce results from extant international relations research that use instrumental variables (IV). Most existing uses of IV focus almost exclusively on an exclusion restriction assumption. Yet, an equally important assumption concerns the degree to which instruments are correlated with observables that also affect outcomes, an independence assumption. We document the degree to which existing applications uphold this assumption and describe sensitivity testing approaches that can circumscribe inferences in the presence of violations of the independence assumption.