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August 2013 - present
Publications
Publications (50)
How will advances in digital technology affect the future of human rights and authoritarian rule? Media figures, public intellectuals, and scholars have debated this relationship for decades, with some arguing that new technologies facilitate mobilization against the state and others countering that the same technologies allow authoritarians to str...
Distrust in scientific expertise1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 is dangerous. Opposition to vaccination with a future vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the causal agent of COVID-19, for example, could amplify outbreaks2,3,4, as happened for measles in 20195,6. Homemade remedies7,8 and falsehoods are being shared widely on the Internet, as well as dismis...
Is there more violence in the middle? Over 100 studies have analyzed whether violent outcomes such as civil war, terrorism, and repression are more common in regimes that are neither full autocracies nor full democracies, yet findings are inconclusive. While this hypothesis is ultimately about functional form, existing work uses models in which a p...
Are publics in great power democracies more likely to approve of foreign armed combatants that comply with international humanitarian law (IHL)? There is a wealth of evidence that armed combatants with an incentive to seek the support of outside compliance constituencies are more likely to adhere to IHL. Yet a key mechanism underlying these claims—...
Online extremist movements are increasingly using social media communities to share content, spread their ideologies, recruit members, and mobilize offline activities. In recent years, mainstream platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, have adopted policies to remove or deplatform some of these movements. Yet online extremists are well-known for...
Online hate speech is a critical and worsening problem, with extremists using social media platforms to radicalize recruits and coordinate offline violent events. While much progress has been made in analyzing online hate speech, no study to date has classified multiple types of hate speech across both mainstream and fringe platforms. We conduct a...
How does targeting in armed conflict affect public opinion in conflict zones? Armed actors choose between targeting militaries and civilians, further choosing whether to target civilians discriminately or indiscriminately. Existing work suggests these choices have important implications for conflict dynamics, in part by influencing public opinion,...
What is the impact of uncommon but notable violent acts on conflict dynamics? We analyze the impact of the murder of a Palestinian child on the broader dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian violence in Jerusalem. By using novel micro-level event data and utilizing Discrete Furrier Transform and Bayesian Poisson Change Point Analysis, we compare the impac...
We reveal hidden social media machinery that has allowed misinformation to thrive among mainstream users, but which is missing from current policy discussions. Specifically, we show how mainstream parenting communities on Facebook have been subject to a powerful, two-pronged misinformation machinery during the pandemic, that has pulled them closer...
Online hate speech is a critical and worsening problem, with extremists using social media platforms to radicalize recruits and coordinate offline violent events. While much progress has been made in analyzing online hate speech, no study to date has classified multiple types of hate speech across both mainstream and fringe platforms. We conduct a...
Ensuring widespread public exposure to best-science guidance is crucial in a crisis, e.g. Covid-19, climate change. Mapping the emitter-receiver dynamics of Covid-19 guidance among 87 million Facebook users, we uncover a multi-sided battle over exposure that gets lost well before the pandemic's official announcement. By the time Covid-19 vaccines e...
We show that malicious COVID-19 content, including racism, disinformation, and misinformation, exploits the multiverse of online hate to spread quickly beyond the control of any individual social media platform. We provide a first mapping of the online hate network across six major social media platforms. We demonstrate how malicious content can tr...
Disrupting the emergence and evolution of potentially violent online extremist movements is a crucial challenge. Extremism research has analyzed such movements in detail, focusing on individual- and movement-level characteristics. But are there system-level commonalities in the ways these movements emerge and grow? Here we compare the growth of the...
Parents - particularly moms - increasingly consult social media for support when taking decisions about their young children, and likely also when advising other family members such as elderly relatives. Minimizing malignant online influences is therefore crucial to securing their assent for policies ranging from vaccinations, masks and social dist...
We show that malicious COVID-19 content, including racism, disinformation, and misinformation, exploits the multiverse of online hate to spread quickly beyond the control of any individual social media platform. We provide a first mapping of the online hate network across six major social media platforms. We demonstrate how malicious content can tr...
We show that the eclectic "Boogaloo" extremist movement that is now rising to prominence in the U.S., has a hidden online mathematical order that is identical to ISIS during its early development, despite their stark ideological, geographical and cultural differences. The evolution of each across scales follows a single shockwave equation that acco...
A huge amount of potentially dangerous COVID-19 misinformation is appearing online. Here we use machine learning to quantify COVID-19 content among online opponents of establishment health guidance, in particular vaccinations ("anti-vax"). We find that the anti-vax community is developing a less focused debate around COVID-19 than its counterpart,...
We show that malicious COVID-19 content, including hate speech, disinformation, and misinformation, exploits the multiverse of online hate to spread quickly beyond the control of any individual social media platform. Machine learning topic analysis shows quantitatively how online hate communities are weaponizing COVID-19, with topics evolving rapid...
Enforcement of international law is often delegated to national courts, creating a space for them to play a part in international judicialization. Under what conditions can they do so? We argue that the answer depends on the relationship between the political and legal constraints national courts face. National courts must be careful to safeguard t...
Constitutions reflect the character and history of countries, particularly colonial legacy. While legal systems and constitutional texts are often "inherited" from a former coloniser, until now this has not been quantified and interplay with global policy trends and horizontal influence not well understood. In this paper we analyse the structure an...
How can human rights abuses be prevented or reduced? Using a simple game-theoretic model, we demonstrate that repression can become a coordination game when the potential for abuses is greatest: when dissent against a regime has grown sufficiently powerful. In such scenarios, repression depends on how the leader's agents coordinate on implementing...
2018, The Author(s). Constitutions help define domestic political orders, but are known to be influenced by international mechanisms that are normative, temporal and network based. Here we introduce the concept of the ‘provision space’—the set of all legal provisions existing across the world’s constitutions, which grows over time. We make use of t...
Existing work has shown that IGO membership can, among other outcomes, reduce conflict, promote democratization, and shape crisis bargaining. Traditional work on how IGOs reduce conflict focuses on the effects of dyads' direct IGOs ties. This approach is too narrow: we consider the effects of higher-order groupings within the IGO network, which we...
Do advances in information and communications technology help topple authoritarian governments, or do they help such governments tighten their grip on power? Media figures, public intellectuals, and scholars have debated this relationship for decades. What is the net effect of technological advances on authoritarian control? We answer this question...
Has international cooperation become fragmented in recent decades? We focus on a specific form of potential fragmentation in the international system: the extent to which the network of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) consists of distinct clusters of closely cooperating states. IR scholars-including those with an interest in the causes and c...
Constitutions help define domestic political orders, but are known to be influenced by two international mechanisms: one that reflects global temporal trends in legal development, and another that reflects international network dynamics such as shared colonial history. We introduce the provision space; the growing set of all legal provisions existi...
How do international arms control treaties influence state policies? This article investigates this question by analyzing the efficacy of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Despite fierce debate over the last several decades, scholars still lack a full understanding of whether or not the treaty “works.” This debate persists, in part, becaus...
Power sharing is often purported to lead to civil peace, though its effects are disputed. We identify three types of power sharing-inclusive, dispersive, and constraining-and analyze their mechanisms of power allocation. We argue that constraining arrangements, which limit the power of a party or social group, are most likely to protect vulnerable...
Preferences are crucial to the analysis of many key questions regarding
international institutions. This paper analyzes the key predictors of states'
preferences over international institutions. It does so by using a spatial-modeling
approach that conceptualizes a treaty commitment preference space that includes
agreements across multiple policy ar...
Why do states form nonaggression pacts? Nonaggression pacts are different from typical alliances because the latter tend to be focused on relationships between members of the alliance and other states, such as by deterring external threats or mediating the resolution of conflicts between an alliance member and a third party challenger. We offer two...
Powersharing is often purported to lead to civil peace. We identify three types of powersharing: inclusive, dispersive and constraining. Centering on the credible commitment problem, we analyze the mechanisms of power allocation activated by powersharing. We focus on constraining arrangements, which limit the power of any party or social group, and...
Do national legislatures constitute a mechanism by which commitments to international human rights treaties can be made credible? Treaty ratification can activate domestic mechanisms that make repression more costly, and the legislative opposition can enhance these mechanisms. Legislative veto players raise the cost of formalistic repressive strate...
We argue that theories regarding the relationship between trade and conflict could benefit greatly from accounting for the networked structure of international trade. Indirect trade relations reduce the probability of conflict by creating (1) opportunity costs of conflict beyond those reflected by direct trade ties; and (2) negative externalities f...
Independent domestic courts play important roles in enforcing international human rights agreements, thereby providing a mechanism by which international institutions can affect government policy. Yet this enforcement power is constrained not only by independence but also by the courts' ability to overcome information problems. Domestic courts' enf...
How can international courts better establish their legitimacy? We can better answer this question by first focusing on what scholars have learned about how national courts build legitimacy over time. The literature suggests that national courts strategically build legitimacy by balancing their own policy preferences with those of their audiences....
The effects of international institutions on state behavior make up a key research agenda in international relations scholarship. Because states self-select into treaties, we cannot infer that these commitments have causal effects unless we address this selection effect. I explain the significant limitations of the methods used thus far to overcome...
The Common Law evolves not only through the outcomes of cases, but also through the reasoning and citations to precedent employed in judicial opinions. We focus on citations to precedent by the U.S. Supreme Court. We demonstrate how strategic interaction between justices during the Court's bargaining process affects citations to precedent in the Co...
The discipline of political science has developed an active research program on international institutions. Among its top ranks are scholars who study the development, operation, spread and impact of international legal doctrine and organizations – also matters of great interest to the legal community. Meanwhile, a growing number of public internat...
A pair of recent studies, motivated largely by limitations in the research designs of previous projects, offers evidence the authors interpret as contradicting audience cost theory. Although we share the authors’ ambivalence about audience costs, we are not convinced by their evidence. What one seeks in looking for audience costs is evidence of a c...
Why and how do international courts justify decisions with citations to their own case law? We argue that, like domestic review courts, international courts use precedent at least in part to convince “lower” (domestic) courts of the legitimacy of judgments. Several empirical observations are consistent with this view, which we examine through a net...
The First World War is generally viewed by both advocates and critics of commercial liberal theory as the quintessential example of a failure of economic integration to maintain peace. Yet this consensus relies both on methodologically flawed inference and an incomplete accounting of the antecedents to the war. Crucially, the war began in a weakly...
The discipline of political science has developed an active research program on international institutions. Among its top ranks are scholars who study the development, operation, spread and impact of international legal doctrine and organizations – also matters of great interest to the legal community. Meanwhile, a growing number of public internat...
In light of several recent international legal and political crises, a wide spectrum of proposals has emerged to reform the rules of the United Nations Charter. These proposals range from broadening the right of states to use force in self-defense to allowing states to conduct humanitarian interventions without the approval of the Security Council....
As Web sites have sought to distinguish themselves from their competitors in recent years, many Web site operators have turned to Web monitoring devices, such as cookies, as a means of customizing the sites to the individual user. Third-party businesses are increasingly performing this type of monitoring as a service to Web sites, by placing their...
While political scientists have become increasingly interested in the output of international courts, they have paid little attention to the manner by which these courts justify their decisions and develop legal norms. We address these issues through a network analysis of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) citations. We argue that, like domesti...
