Erik Voeten’s research while affiliated with Georgetown University and other places

Energy transition policies often have distributional effects that could have electoral consequences. I study this issue in the context of a Dutch policy change that increased taxes on household natural gas consumption and redistributed the revenues as subsidies for renewables. Radical right parties were the only source of political opposition. A Differences-in-Differences (DiD) analysis with panel data from 2007-2020 shows that after the policy change renters with individualized utility bills became 5–6 percentage points more likely to vote for the radical right compared to renters with utilities included in their rents. Renters with individualized utility bills also became relatively less sympathetic towards the Green party and more concerned about price increases but they did not alter their left-right self-placements nor their views on immigration or the European Union. A secondary analysis finds similar effects for individuals (including home-owners) who are energy poor. This suggests an emerging economically rooted political cleavage over energy transition policies.

What does the decline in paradigmatic self-identification mean for how international relations (IR) scholars think about the world? We answer this question with a 2020 survey among nearly two thousand IR scholars. We uncover a two-dimensional latent theoretical belief space based on scholarly agreement with conjectures about the state, ideas, international institutions, domestic politics, globalization, and racism. The first dimension separates status quo–oriented scholars from more critical scholars. The second dimension captures the realist–institutionalist divide. We have three key findings. First, non-paradigmatic scholars vary greatly in their theoretical beliefs. Second, measurement invariance tests show that there is a similar structure underlying the beliefs of paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic scholars. Third, we find no evidence that non-paradigmatic scholars rely less on their theoretical beliefs in making predictions about conflict, institutions, political economy, democracy, and human rights. Instead, the positions of scholars in the two-dimensional theoretical belief space rather than self-assigned paradigmatic labels correlate with predictions about the world. Our findings suggest that non-paradigmatic scholars are not so different from self-identified Liberals, Constructivists, and Realists, although the decline of paradigmatic self-identification may still matter for how scholars organize debates and disciplinary divides.

How does backlash from consolidated democracies affect the behavior of liberal international institutions? We argue that liberal international institutions have incentives to appease their democratic critics. Liberal institutions rely on democratic support for their continued effectiveness and can accommodate democratic critics at a lower legitimacy cost than non-democratic challengers. We examine this theory in the context of the European Court of Human Rights using a new dataset of rulings until 2019 and a coding of government positions during multiple reform conferences. Combining matching and a difference-in-differences design, we find strong evidence that the Court exercises restraint towards consolidated democracies that have criticized the Court in multilateral reform conferences by rendering fewer violation judgments against these states. We find some evidence that governments have also recently appointed more deferential judges. The findings suggest that backlash can affect liberal international institutions even without membership exit.

International courts, like domestic courts, protect liberal limits on majoritarianism. This sometimes puts these courts in a position to protect the property rights of the “corrupt elites” that are targeted by populists or the civil liberties of those who are targeted in domestic populist identity politics. Moreover, populism offers an ideology to attack the authority of a court rather than just its individual rulings. An empirical examination illustrates the plausibility of this argument. A large number of backlashes against international courts arise from judgments that reinforce local populist mobilization narratives. Populist backlashes against international courts are not just about sovereignty but often follow efforts to curb domestic courts, usually for similar reasons. Yet populist backlashes do not always succeed, either because populist leaders do not follow up on their exit threats or because populism is too thin an ideology for creating successful multilateral reform coalitions.

The design of international institutions varies in many ways: Institutions can be more or less formal, flexible, independent, precise, inclusive, centralized, and so on. This article classifies theoretical efforts to make sense of these similarities and differences. First, some theories focus on the bargains or contracts that attempt to construct equilibrium behavior while other theories analyze institutional design as a dynamic process. Second, theories vary in whether they understand institutional design as a response to the environment in which institutions operate or as a function of the incentives, interests, values, initiatives, and power of the actors that created the institutions. The article discusses four ideal-typical theoretical approaches that fit in each quadrant of the resulting 2×2 typology: rational functionalist, distributive rationalist, historical institutionalist, and structural process theories. These approaches identify different causes for suboptimal or even dysfunctional institutional design: domestic politics, power politics, path dependence, and culture. The conclusion discusses how these theories can help us make sense of current challenges to institutions and their design. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science Volume 22 is May 11, 2019. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

International human rights institutions often rely on “naming and shaming” to promote compliance with global norms. Critics charge that such institutions are too politicized; states condemn human rights violations selectively, based on their strategic interests, while protecting friends and allies. In this view, politicization undermines shaming’s credibility and thus its effectiveness. This paper offers an alternative account of such institutions and the mechanism by which they promote human rights. We argue that interstate shaming is an inherently political exercise that operates through strategic relationships, not in spite of them. While states are less likely to criticize their friends and allies, any criticism they do offer is more influential precisely because of this pre-existing partnership. We test this argument through quantitative analysis of the most elaborate human rights mechanism in the international system: the United Nations Universal Periodic Review. We find that states are more lenient towards their strategic partners in the peer-review process. Yet when they do criticize, their recommendations are accepted more often than substantially identical recommendations emanating from other states with fewer strategic ties. Insofar as shaming disseminates powerful signals regarding political relationships between states, these interactions can be meaningful and influential, even as they remain selective and politicized.