Richard Clark’s research while affiliated with University of Notre Dame and other places

States have increasingly taken steps to reshore manufacturing by shifting production back home from abroad. Although the literature on responses to globalization is increasingly robust, scholars tend to focus on the political consequences of economic dislocations, the effectiveness of government policies intended to roll back globalization, and the macroeconomic consequences of such policies. Our research is among the first to study public attitudes toward reshoring, including the basis of support, demographic variation, and sensitivity to factors like consumer prices. We advance hypotheses about the role of national security considerations and economic self-interest in shaping why and under what conditions the public backs incentives and investments that bring manufacturing home. We field two pre-registered survey experiments to representative samples of the American public, finding that US citizens support reshoring in most cases, irrespective of political party. Only the prospect of severe price increases and reshoring from geographically proximate allies moderate these responses. Our findings advance literatures on reshoring and public attitudes toward economic relationships, with implications for policy as governments consider reshoring a range of industries from technology to pharmaceuticals.

Member state participation is essential in global governance, affording international organizations (IOs) legitimacy and translating member state preferences into institutional attention. We contend that institutional leadership positions bolster states’ authority via “proxy representation,” in which states are grouped together and indirectly represented by one leader. We argue that by serving as proxy group leaders, even relatively weak states can obtain greater influence in IOs. We examine these expectations in the context of the IMF’s Executive Board, where wealthy states represent themselves directly while other states belong to multi-member constituencies in which leadership often rotates among members. Focusing on issues related to climate change discussions at the IMF—a key concern for Global South countries and an increasingly important issue in international finance—we examine the extent to which countries’ preferences over climate issues are expressed at IMF Board meetings. Using textual data based on 52,551 internal IMF documents from 1987-2017, we find evidence to support our theoretical expectations; states more effectively advance their preferences when they are proxy leaders — this finding holds robustly even for otherwise weak states. These results suggest that even in IOs with highly asymmetric decision-making, weaker states can gain voice through proxy representation. This has important and positive implications for IO legitimacy, as member state participation is integral to the livelihood of these institutions.

Populists’ ideological opposition to global governance is well recognized, yet whether and how these actors systematically undermine international organizations remain unclear. The authors argue that a key means by which populists warp global governance is by distorting scientific information, which is necessary for global responses to many public health and environmental issues. Populists are motivated to withhold or misreport scientific information due to their anti-elite, prostate sovereignty views. Using new data on the source and quality of information provided to international organizations (ios), the authors find that populist leaders are significantly less likely to provide scientific information to ios than are other types of leaders. When they do offer such data, they are less accurate than the information that other sources supply. The authors’ findings suggest that populism may stymie international institutions’ ability to govern in areas of pressing international concern.

International organizations (IOs) are rapidly reorienting around climate change, despite powerful principal states having divergent preferences on the issue. When and why do IOs prioritize climate change? We argue that they do so as a result of an endogenous process of staff learning and rotation. IO staff surveil and implement programs in target states. When working in climate‐vulnerable countries, they come to see climate change as an issue warranting aggressive action. As these staff are rotated and promoted, interest in climate diffuses outwards and upwards through the institution. To test this theory, we introduce original data tracking the International Monetary Fund's attention to climate change and the career paths of key staff. We complement this with interviews of International Monetary Fund personnel. We find support for our theory.

The drivers of public support for international organizations (IOs) are multifaceted and contested. Focusing on the US, we argue that citizens weigh elite cues about the financial burden associated with funding IOs and the influence over IOs that such funding yields. Moreover, we identify political ideology as a powerful moderator – theorizing that conservatives should respond more positively to cues about US influence and more negatively to cues about financial costs than liberals. We find support for the core theory, but also counterintuitively find that the negative effect of the cost treatment manifests primarily amongst liberals as opposed to conservatives. A second, pre-registered experiment reveals that conservatives support increasing funding to IOs to secure US influence, and may even support increasing taxes to do so, especially when cued by a co-partisan. By contrast, liberals who learn that funding provides influence prefer to cut funding to IOs, even when cued by a co-partisan.

How do policies in international organizations reflect the preferences of powerful institutional stakeholders? Using an underutilized data set on the conditions associated with World Bank loans, we find that borrower countries that vote with the United States at the United Nations are required to enact fewer domestic policy reforms, and on fewer and softer issue areas. Though U.S. preferences permeate World Bank decision making, we do not find evidence that borrower countries trade favors in exchange for active U.S. intervention on their behalf. Instead, we propose that U.S. influence operates indirectly when World Bank staff—consciously or unconsciously—design programs that are compatible with U.S. preferences. Our study provides novel evidence of World Bank conditionality and shows that politicized policies can result even from autonomous bureaucracies.

As both China and India are moving away from coal in the power sector, Southeast Asia has emerged as arguably the most important region for future growth in coal-fired power generation. Here we use data from the January 2017 edition of the Global Coal Plant Tracker to understand coal’s fortunes in the region. More specifically, we manipulate three key policy levers – attrition rate, capacity factor, and plant lifespan – to provide a timely update on the future of coal in Southeast Asia. Using improved estimates of the attrition rate for planned power plants and capacity factors in different countries, we find that status-quo trends in Southeast Asian coal-fired power generation would significantly hamper the region’s ability to contribute to global efforts to limit warming to 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Celsius in line with international agreements, namely the 2009 Copenhagen and 2016 Paris Agreements. Though meeting these targets may be possible if policymakers limit the entry into service of new coal power capacity and reduce use of existing units, qualitative evidence suggests that there may be a lack of political will to do so.

What is the relationship between political institutions and air pollution generated by the power sector? Here we focus on the association between democracy and power generated from coal, the most polluting of all fossil fuels. Using a new dataset on coal‐fired power plants commissioned between 1980 and 2016 in 71 countries, we find that the relationship between democracy and coal varies according to the environmental Kuznets curve logic. Democratic political institutions at lower levels of economic development are correlated with increased commissioning of coal power plants, as governments seek to appeal to an electorate prioritizing economic growth and affordable energy access. As a country becomes richer, democracy comes to have a negative association with coal power, as clean air becomes a more salient issue for the public.