Darren Hawkins

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Brigham Young University

Widespread corruption and lack of trust in political institutions are common development problems that are likely deeply interconnected. We contribute to the existing understanding of their relationship using survey experimental methods and by investigating how different dimensions of corruption affect trust. Does grand versus petty corruption affe...

Although the amount of policy-relevant academic research has grown in recent years, studies still find that policy practitioners seldom employ such research in their decisionmaking. This study considers potential methods for increasing government officials’ use of academic studies (impact evidence). We investigate how administrative accountability...

Americans think the US foreign aid budget is far too generous. Can information change those views? We identified ten prominent arguments about aid in public discussion, five positive and five negative. In a survey experiment, we exposed respondents to one of those arguments with five associated facts. Most of the arguments in favor of aid made resp...

Government transparency is widely promoted, yet little is known about transparency’s effects. Survey experiments reported here, made on the streets of Lima, Peru, investigate a simple question: what are the effects of government-sponsored transparency websites, and the information revealed by those efforts, on attitudes about the Peruvian political...

How and to what extent do states influence the level of democracy and autocracy in other states? Quantitative studies focusing on international determinants of domestic regime type have demonstrated that both democracies and autocracies tend to cluster in space and time in a pattern that suggests institutional transfer or diffusion. We argue that t...

We examine the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) from the perspective of a principal-agent analysis. How much control did states exercise over the Court's prosecutor and what strategies did the prosecutor use to expand the Court's discretion? Although states generally delegate substantial discretion to international courts in order to maintain...

Goodliffe, Jay et al. (2012) Dependence Networks and the International Criminal Court. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2478.2011.00703.x © 2012 International Studies Association This article explores why governments commit to human rights enforcement by joining the International Criminal Court (ICC). Compared with other interna...

In this introductory essay to the special issue, we introduce a new dataset of foreign assistance, AidData, that covers more bilateral and multilateral donors and more types of aid than existing datasets while also improving project-level information about the purposes and activities funded by aid. We utilize that data to provide a brief overview o...

States have increased their international commitments to human rights and democracy norms by legalizing them in prominent regional organizations such as the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the Organization of American States. In these organizations, human rights and democracy norms have become increasingly obligatory through binding lega...

The first proposal for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1994 envisioned a weak institution. Over the subsequent four years, states surprisingly strengthened the draft to create a robust ICC with novel enforcement authority. What happened and why? We argue that during negotiations governments adopted the positions of the international partn...

In this paper, we identify authority as an important dimension of variance among international institutions. Essentially, the greater the authority of international institutions, the more sovereignty states have yielded to them. Highly authoritative institutions can make decisions that legally bind domestic governments on specified issues even with...

Why have states legalised international norms promoting domestic democracy in some regions of the world? This issue poses a difficult puzzle because standard assumptions about state preferences for sovereignty make the creation of strong, binding international rules on democracy unlikely. We identify four possible answers: the interests of powerful...

Especially since the end of the Cold War, the Council of Europe (CE) and the Organization of American States (OAS) have acted to protect democracy in their member states from erosion or reversals, with CE policies more robust than those in the Americas. What explains this variation? I develop an argument focusing on institutional permeability, or t...

U.S. policy toward the International Criminal Court is disconnected from the central politics of the Court and focused on a mostly irrelevant sideshow. The Court’s fundamental political problem is its need for money and security forces to arrest suspects and try them. This feature makes the Court more subject to the control of powerful states tha...

A growing body of international relations literature examines the delegation of state authority to international organizations. Delegation is a conditional grant of authority from a principal to an agent in which the latter is empowered to act on behalf of the former. This paper explores the effect of agent permeability to interested third parties...

In December 1999, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into a mob protesting the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. A central theme of this and similar anti-globalization protests is that the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and other global institutions are “runaway” international bureaucracies implementing a “Washington consensus” formulated b...

Why do states commit to international human rights treaties that may limit state sovereignty? Existing arguments focus on either the fear of domestic democratic instability or on international norms. We focus instead on the variation in three kinds of costs that states must pay to commit: policy change, unintended consequences, and limited flexibil...

Why do states delegate certain tasks and responsibilities to international organizations rather than acting unilaterally or cooperating directly? Furthermore, to what extent do states continue to control IOs once authority has been delegated? Examining a variety of different institutions, including the World Trade Organization, the United Nations,...

Why do states create enforceable international human rights norms that empower third parties to prevent and sanction domestic human rights abuses? Recent theories suggest that international institutions are shaped not only by power and interests but also by the content of arguments during intensive communication and argumentation processes. Moving...

In this paper, the authors argue that a new international norm against comprehensive sanctions is emerging and gaining substantial support among states. A transnational network of individual activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) is driving the creation of this norm. To exercise its influence, the...

Book reviewed: Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink

DARREN HAWKINS and MELISSA HUMES explain why western hemisphere states rapidly adopted policies to combat domestic violence in the 1990s. They develop a twostage model in which domestic politics drives early adopters and international socialization prods followers to action. Leader states possess autonomous women's groups and domestic windows of op...

Democratization theories and empirical studies have been slow to incorporate cases of nontransition. Good research design requires such cases. In the absence of negative cases the factors thought to contribute to democratization have multiplied, and it has not been possible to weed out less useful hypotheses. This article examines five prominent de...

International pressures on authoritarian regimes to respect human rights are increasingly common yet their impact is relatively unknown and hotly debated. Recent studies suggest that international pressures can have a limited yet important effect when they strengthen and reinforce favorable domestic processes. I identify three domestic conditions c...

We examine a previously untapped dataset which quantifies NGO Capacity, or the ability of NGOs to formulate and implement their goals. We explore these data, and compare them with another little-used dataset – the mechanism donor states use to deliver their foreign aid to intended beneficiaries. Utilizing a sample selection model, we investigate ho...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

Does state identity play a role in why governments enter into international agreements? Given the centrality of identity in the definition of norms, international agreements that incorporate norms should be especially likely to attract states with the relevant identities. To operationalize identity, we use the founding charters of international org...

This article provides theoretical and empirical solutions to two connected puzzles in the study of foreign aid and human rights: do foreign aid donors use aid sanctions to punish repressive states, and if so, why? I show that donors impose aid sanctions selectively. Aid sanctions typically occur when repressive states do not have close political ti...