Stephen Chaudoin

• PhD, Princeton University, Department of Politics
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

A broad class of theories, applied to a wide array of substantive issues, argues that international institutions facilitate compliance by mobilizing procompliance domestic groups. I develop a general model of political contestation over compliance policy in which institutions mobilize both pro-and anticompliance groups. The model predicts that inst...

If international institutions are such potent alarm mechanisms that mobilize pro-compliance domestic audiences, as argued by many existing theories, then why do countries wait so long before sounding the alarm? WTO members often wait months or even years before objecting to their trading partners’ WTO-illegal barriers. To turn a phrase, trade coope...

Is a policymaker's audience more concerned with the consistency between words and deeds or with policy itself? A key assumption of audience costs theories of crisis bargaining and international cooperation is that audience members have strong preferences for consistency between their leader's commitments and their leader's actual policy choices. Ho...

Chapman, Terrence L. and Stephen Chaudoin (2012) Ratification Patterns and the International Criminal Court. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/isqu.12005 © 2012 International Studies Association What types of countries have ratified the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court? Because the court relies on state coopera...

Outcomes of interest to International Relations scholars are the product of complex relationships between domestic and systemic variables. We use IR theory to outline five types of possible theoretical relationships. We then describe a process of choosing the best empirical model for each theory, showing the assumptions entailed in each and ways to...

Can international organizations (IOs) boost support for their authority? We consider the effectiveness of appeals to the principle of complementarity, which holds that IOs only act when domestic institutions fail. Supporters of IOs like the International Criminal Court (ICC) frequently use complementarity as an argument to rally support for interna...

How does the experience of being elected alter subsequent leader behavior at the international level? We argue for the existence of an election effect, through which a democratic election intensifies in-group identification and generates a sense of obligation to voters, while simultaneously increasing out-group hostility. These combined effects cau...

What arguments affect citizen support for policies? Most existing studies of preferences emphasize direct effects on personal welfare. Yet, for many regulatory policies—like financial regulations—recent theories highlight indirect policy externalities, such as interdependent foreign policies and/or global economic networks. We theorize that citizen...

Many political phenomena—from wars to elections and lobbying—involve winner-take-all contests in which the value of the prize differs across the actors involved and from one issue to the next. To better understand competitive behavior in such environments, we conduct a controlled laboratory experiment in which participants face a series of asymmetr...

A recent RIPE article by Jerry Cohen argues that current research on the political economy of money has stagnated because of its overemphasis on the scientific method and domestic variables. We argue that a wide array of scientifically oriented research on the IPE of money considers the system in many different ways. To help build a dialogue, we ca...

This article uses a replication experiment of ninety-four specifications from sixteen different studies to show the severity of the problem of selection on unobservables. Using a variety of approaches, it shows that membership in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization has a significant effect on a surprisingly high numb...

Exporters, trade lawyers, policy makers, and academics see the WTO's Dispute Settlement Understanding as an important, though costly, venue for facilitating the removal of harmful barriers to trade. If this conventional wisdom holds, then disputes should increase trade. We provide a careful analysis of trade flows in the wake of WTO disputes. We fi...

There is a tremendous amount of variation in conflict intensity both across and within civil conflicts. Some conflicts result in huge numbers of battle deaths, while others do not. Conflict intensity is also dynamic. Conflict intensity escalates, de-escalates, and persists. What explains this variation? We take one of the most prominent explanation...

Since every fourth American is an evangelical, their position on climate policy is important to determining the role that the United States could play in global climate cooperation. Do evangelicals oppose all climate policies, or are they particularly opposed to certain types of policies? We argue that American evangelicals oppose climate policy du...

Lobbies are active participants in international cooperation. In a repeated game, we allow domestic lobbies to offer contingent rewards to influence their government to make pro-cooperation policy adjustments. The effect of lobbies depends on the type and intensity of their preferences. If the lobbies are "internationally benefiting," i.e. they are...

We analyze the effects of income on the severity of civil wars, departing from existing analyses which focus almost entirely on the extensive margin. Comparing our results with analogous estimates that use a binary indicator for war, we demonstrate that omitting conflict severity and state dependence significantly understates the effects of income...

Existing theories argue that legalized dispute settlement plays an important role in transmitting information to subnational actors, most often the general voting public, about the compliance behavior of member states. I better specify these theories in order to derive predictions about the timing of formal international disputes. Disputes should b...

: Recent research, including an article by Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz in this journal, has argued that the United States’ long-standing foreign policy orientation of liberal internationalism has been in serious decline because of rising domestic partisan divisions. A reanalysis of the theoretical logic driving these arguments and the emp...

Abstract will be provided by author.

How do domestic politics affect the timing of legalized international disputes? I develop a theory of how plaintiffs in international disputes can use dispute settlement to transmit infor-mation to domestic audiences in the defendant state. The preferences and political strength of those audiences affect how the defendant government responds to the...

Despite a great deal of scholarly interest in how economic variables affect the probability of civil conflict occuring Miguel, Satyanath and Sergenti (2004), relatively little research has exam-ined how these factors affect the intensity of conflict. In this paper we develop a novel instrumen-tal variables strategy that allows us to estimate the ca...

International dispute settlement mechanisms are thought to play an important role in facilitating in-ternational cooperation because disputes transmit information about member state behavior to domestic audiences. I develop a formal model with two key features: (1) the decision to initiate a dispute is endogenous as opposed to automatic and (2) the...