Suchergebnisse

This article provides a roadmap for understanding the points of agreement and contention that characterize contemporary empirical scholarship on international human rights legal regimes. It explores what the statistical research teaches us about why states participate in these regimes; knowledge of how these regimes operate; and their relationship to actual human rights behavior. It also describes the central shortcomings of this research tradition and suggests a few areas especially promising for future research. Adapted from the source document.

International organizations (IOs) have moved increasingly in recent years to adopt cross-cutting mandates that require the "mainstreaming" of particular issues, such as gender equality or environmental protection, across all IO policies. Successful IO performance with respect to such mandates, we hypothesize, is determined in large part by the use of hard or soft institutional measures to shape the incentives of sectoral officials whose cooperation is required for successful implementation. We test this hypothesis with respect to two such mandates—gender mainstreaming and environmental policy integration—in a single international organization, the European Union, demonstrating a strong causal link between the use of hard incentives and IO performance in these and related mandates.

There is growing evidence that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) provide strong institutional incentives to prevent international conflict among member states, often creating the conditions of trust that can help prevent militarized aggression. We provide an approach to the study of how international institutions influence conflict behavior that considers how PTAs exclude as well as include members and create asymmetrical relationships among members that could exacerbate conflict. PTAs do more than create expectations of economic gains and reduce opportunism; they also create hierarchical relations between states, which can encourage conflict under different conditions due to distrust. We theorize these conditions for militarized international disputes, develop appropriate measures using social network analysis, and test our expectations on new PTA data during the period 1950 to 2000.

Two big assumptions fuel current mobilization against and policy discussions about the U.S. war on terror and its implications for human rights and international cooperation. First, terrorism creates strong pressures on governments—especially democracies—to restrict human rights. Second, these restrictions are not only immoral and illegal, but also counterproductive to curbing terrorism. If these two assumptions are correct, then democracies face a vicious circle: terrorist attacks provoke a reaction that makes it harder to defeat terrorist organizations.

The discipline of political science has developed an active research program on the development, operation, spread, and impact of international legal norms, agreements, and institutions. Meanwhile, a growing number of public international lawyers have developed an interest in political science research and methods. For more than two decades, scholars have been calling for international lawyers and political scientists to collaborate, and have suggested possible frameworks for doing so. Some prominent collaborations are under way—sharing research methods and insights.

Why do countries join international human rights institutions, when membership often yields few material gains and constrains state sovereignty? This article argues that entering a human rights institution can yield substantial benefits for democratizing states. Emerging democracies can use the 'sovereignty costs' associated with membership to lock in liberal policies and signal their intent to consolidate democracy. It also argues, however, that the magnitude of these costs varies across different human rights institutions, which include both treaties and international organizations. Consistent with this argument, the study finds that democratizing states tend to join human rights institutions that impose greater constraints on state sovereignty.

Experimental evidence in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics is transforming the way political science scholars think about how humans make decisions in areas of high complexity, uncertainty, and risk. Nearly all those studies utilize convenience samples of university students, but in the real world political elites actually make most pivotal political decisions such as threatening war or changing the course of economic policy. Highly experienced elites are more likely to exhibit the attributes of rational decision-making; and over the last fifteen years a wealth of studies suggest that such elites are likely to be more skilled in strategic bargaining than samples with less germane experience. However, elites are also more likely to suffer overconfidence, which degrades decision-making skills. We illustrate implications for political science with a case study of crisis bargaining between the US and North Korea. Variations in the experience of US elite decision-makers between 2002 and 2006 plausibly explain the large shift in US crisis signaling better than other rival hypotheses such as "Iraq fatigue." Beyond crisis bargaining other major political science theories might benefit from attention to the attributes of individual decision-makers.