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This paper puts forth a theory explaining domestic backlash against international investment law by connecting media coverage—specifically the bias in the news media's selection of international disputes—to public opinion formation towards international agreements. To test our theory, we examine both the content and effects of the media's reporting on international disputes, focusing on the increasingly controversial form known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). We find that newspaper outlets in both the United States and Canada have a bias in favor of covering disputes filed against their home country as opposed to those filed by home country firms. Using two national survey experiments fielded in the United States and Canada, we further find that the bias in news story selection has a strong negative effect on attitudes towards ISDS and related agreements, especially among highly nationalistic individuals.

United Nations (UN) General Assembly votes have become the standard data source for measures of states preferences over foreign policy. Most papers use dyadic indicators of voting similarity between states. We propose a dynamic ordinal spatial model to estimate state ideal points from 1946 to 2012 on a single dimension that reflects state positions toward the US-led liberal order. We use information about the content of the UN's agenda to make estimates comparable across time. Compared to existing measures, our estimates better separate signal from noise in identifying foreign policy shifts, have greater face validity, allow for better intertemporal comparisons, are less sensitive to shifts in the UN' agenda, and are strongly correlated with measures of liberalism. We show that the choice of preference measures affects conclusions about the democratic peace.

AbstractSome scholars build models to classify documents into chosen categories. Others, especially social scientists who tend to focus on population characteristics, instead usually estimate the proportion of documents in each category—using either parametric "classify-and-count" methods or "direct" nonparametric estimation of proportions without individual classification. Unfortunately, classify-and-count methods can be highly model-dependent or generate more bias in the proportions even as the percent of documents correctly classified increases. Direct estimation avoids these problems, but can suffer when the meaning of language changes between training and test sets or is too similar across categories. We develop an improved direct estimation approach without these issues by including and optimizing continuous text features, along with a form of matching adapted from the causal inference literature. Our approach substantially improves performance in a diverse collection of 73 datasets. We also offer easy-to-use software that implements all ideas discussed herein.

Abstract
One of the mechanisms by which international law can shape domestic politics is through its effects on public opinion. However, a growing number of national leaders have begun to advocate policies that ignore or even deny international law constraints. This article investigates whether international law messages can still shift public opinion even in the face of countervailing elite cues. It reports results from survey experiments conducted in three countries – the USA, Australia and India – which examined attitudes on a highly salient domestic political issue: restrictions on refugee admissions. In each experimental vignette, respondents were asked about their opinion on a proposed or ongoing restrictive refugee policy that was endorsed by the government but also likely contravened international refugee law. Respondents were randomly exposed to messages highlighting the policy's illegality and/or elite endorsement. The results show that, on average, the international law messages had a small but significant persuasive effect in reducing support for the restrictive policy, at most 10 percentage points. Surprisingly, there was no evidence that the countervailing elite endorsement was a significant moderator of this effect. However, in the case of the USA and among Republican co-partisans of the president, the elite endorsement independently increased respondents' beliefs that the restriction was legal under international law while having no effect on support for the policy. The results suggest that cues from domestic elites do not strictly trump those from international sources and that, despite cues about national leaders' policy advocacy, international law can affect the attitudes of some voters even on an issue as heavily politicized as refugee policy.