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The argument that reputational concerns promote compliance is at the center of the literature of international cooperation. In this paper, we study how reputational sanctions affect compliance when domestic parties carry their own reputations in international negotiations. We showed that the prospect of international cooperation varies a lot depending on who sits at the negotiation table, how partisan preferences for compliance are different, and how much international audiences discriminate between different types of noncompliance. We illustrate implications of our model using episodes from the negotiations between the United States and North Korea over North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

AbstractThis paper highlights the concept of dignity as the cornerstone that justifies hate speech regulations in democratic societies. In political theory and constitutional law, the primacy of dignity as the moral and legislative justification for regulating hate speech has already been addressed by dignitarianism, especially in the course of debate with free speech advocates. We aim to augment this important claim in the normative literature with empirical data. Specifically, based on our survey conducted in Japan, where its first national anti-hate speech law had only recently been enacted and ordinary citizens were thus less predisposed of the debate, we show that citizens' concerns about the dignity of a targeted victim lead them to support regulations. Our analysis further clarifies the possible mechanisms of the dignitarian rationale, revealing not only the people's public-centered expectation regarding the societal consequences of hate speech, which dignitarians emphasized, but also the importance of more individual-based judgments regarding morality and justice, in shaping their regulatory attitudes.

Are civilian attitudes a useful predictor of patterns of violence in civil wars? A prominent debate has emerged among scholars and practitioners about the importance of winning civilian 'hearts and minds' for influencing their wartime behavior. We argue that such efforts may have a dark side: insurgents can use pro-counterinsurgent attitudes as cues to select their targets and tactics. We conduct an original survey experiment in 204 Afghan villages and establish a positive association between pro-International Security Assistance Force attitudes and future Taliban attacks. We extend our analysis to 14,606 non-surveyed villages and demonstrate that our measure of civilian attitudes improves out-of-sample predictive performance by 20–30% over a standard forecasting model. The results are especially strong for Taliban attacks with improvised explosive devices. These improvements in predictive power remain even after adjusting for possible confounders, including past violence, military bases, and development aid.

AbstractInternational donors emphasize greater recipient-country ownership in the delivery of foreign assistance because it ostensibly promotes the efficient use of resources and strengthens recipient-country administrative capacity. The preferences of citizens in developing countries, however, are not well understood on this matter. Do they prefer that their own governments control foreign aid resources, or are there conditions under which they instead prefer that donors maintain control over how aid is implemented? We explore these questions through parallel survey experiments in Myanmar, Nepal, and Indonesia. Our experimental vignettes include two informational treatments: one about who implements aid (i.e., the donor or the recipient government) and the other about the trustworthiness of the foreign donor. The trust-in-donor treatment, on average, increases levels of support for aid in all three countries. In contrast, we observe heterogenous average treatment effects regarding aid control: control of aid by the donor rather than the government reduces levels of support in Indonesia and Myanmar, whereas it increases support levels in Nepal. We show how the cross-country variation in ATEs originates in consistent individual-level variation in reactions to aid control that is more shaped by respondents' trust in their own government than their trust in the donor.