Anton Strezhnev

Estimating Dynamic State Preferences from United Nations Voting Data

United Nations (UN) General Assembly votes have become the standard data source for measures of states preferences over foreign policy. Most papers use dyadic indicators of voting similarity between states. We propose a dynamic ordinal spatial model to estimate state ideal points from 1946 to 2012 on a single dimension that reflects state positions toward the US-led liberal order. We use information about the content of the UN’s agenda to make estimates comparable across time. Compared to existing measures, our estimates better separate signal from noise in identifying foreign policy shifts, have greater face validity, allow for better intertemporal comparisons, are less sensitive to shifts in the UN’ agenda, and are strongly correlated with measures of liberalism. We show that the choice of preference measures affects conclusions about the democratic peace.

booc.io: An Education System with Hierarchical Concept Maps and Dynamic Non-linear Learning Plans

Information hierarchies are difficult to express when real-world space or time constraints force traversing the hierarchy in linear presentations, such as in educational books and classroom courses. We present booc.io, which allows linear and non-linear presentation and navigation of educational concepts and material. To support a breadth of material for each concept, booc.io is Web based, which allows adding material such as lecture slides, book chapters, videos, and LTIs. A visual interface assists the creation of the needed hierarchical structures. The goals of our system were formed in expert interviews, and we explain how our design meets these goals. We adapt a real-world course into booc.io, and perform introductory qualitative evaluation with students.

Investigator Characteristics and Respondent Behavior in Online Surveys

Prior research demonstrates that responses to surveys can vary depending on the race, gender, or ethnicity of the investigator asking the question. We build upon this research by empirically testing how information about researcher identity in online surveys affects subject responses. We do so by conducting an experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in which we vary the name of the researcher in the advertisement for the experiment and on the informed consent page in order to cue different racial and gender identities. We fail to reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference in how respondents answer questions when assigned to a putatively black/white or male/female researcher.

Affiliation Bias in Arbitration: An Experimental Approach

A characteristic feature of arbitration, a growing form of legal adjudication, is that each disputing party appoints an arbitrator. Commentators, however, suggest that party-appointed arbitrators tend to be biased in favor of their appointers. Evaluating this claim from data on historical disputes is problematic because of nonrandom selection of arbitrators. Here we use a novel experimental approach to estimate the causal effect of the appointing party. Using survey experiments with arbitration experts around the world, we show that professional arbitrators suffer from affiliation effects—a cognitive predisposition to favor the appointing party. At a methodological level, we offer a solution to the problem of measuring this effect when credible observational designs are lacking.

The David Effect and ISDS

The legitimacy of international investment law is fiercely contested. Chiefly, scholars argue that investor–state dispute settlement empowers corporations from rich nations over governments of poor ones. Some also assert that poor nations facing investment claims have limited ability to improve their standing in this setting of adjudication. Based on a first-of-its-kind experiment conducted on 257 international arbitrators, this article argues that one avenue to improve standing is for developing countries to exploit their ‘underdog’ status. We presented arbitrators with a vignette describing an investor–state dispute and randomly assigned different features to test their effect. Our results suggest arbitrators are prone to a particular type of bias – surveyed professionals were more likely to grant poor respondent states reimbursement of their legal costs compared to wealthy states when the respondent won the dispute. Based on this ‘David effect’, we argue for re-conceptualizing investor–state arbitration as a tool for partially mitigating power imbalances. David reached into his shepherd’s bag, took out a stone, hurled it from his sling ... The stone sank into Goliath’s forehead.

The David Effect: Underdogs and Investment Arbitrators

The legitimacy of investor-state dispute settlement or ‘ISDS’ is fiercely contested. Chiefly, scholars argue this arbitration mechanism empowers investors from developed states over governments of developing host states. In response, investors (mostly) from developed states argue that without adequate protections, including investor-state arbitration, they would be unable to prevent and resist opportunistic actions like expropriations by developing host states with weak rule of law and institutions. In the resulting setting, developing states facing claims by investors seem to have limited ability to improve their standing in litigation. Based on an experiment conducted on 266 arbitrators, we argue that one potential avenue is for developing host states to exploit their ‘underdog’ status. Our results show that arbitrators may be prone to the ‘David Effect’ — a bias to favor the perceived weaker party in the arbitration. Surveyed arbitrators were more likely to award low income respondent states reimbursement of their legal costs compared to middle income states. Likewise, investors from less developed economies were also more likely to have their costs reimbursed when they win compared to investors from wealthy economies. Our study suggests that the legitimacy of legal regimes depends, in the minds of decision-makers, on a minimum expectation of fairness. This hints at the importance of arbitrators’ beliefs about the distribution of power among litigants in explaining the functioning of the investor-state arbitration system.