Jay Goodliffe

Explaining Commitment: States and the Convention against Torture

Why do states commit to international human rights treaties that may limit state sovereignty? Existing arguments focus on either the fear of domestic democratic instability or on international norms. We focus instead on the variation in three kinds of costs that states must pay to commit: policy change, unintended consequences, and limited flexibility. We use a discrete time-duration model to test all of these explanations on state commitment to the international Convention Against Torture, one of the most important international human rights treaties. We find strong evidence for the importance of norms and all three types of costs, but no evidence supporting state desires to lock in the benefits of democracy in the face of domestic democratic instability.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Rome: Explaining International Criminal Court Negotiations

The first proposal for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1994 envisioned a weak institution. Over the subsequent four years, states surprisingly strengthened the draft to create a robust ICC with novel enforcement authority. What happened and why? We argue that during negotiations governments adopted the positions of the international partners on whom they depend for a diverse set of goods that includes trade, security, and foreign policy success in international organizations. We label this set of partners a “dependence network.” In our approach, leaders watch closely how other governments behave within their dependence network and alter their own actions accordingly. We test this theory against a variety of other explanations on a new database that codes state negotiating positions relative to four key institutional features of the ICC. We find that trade networks substantially influence state negotiating positions on the ICC even taking into account an array of other factors.

When Do War Chests Deter

I present a repeated election model of campaign fund-raising and spending where the incumbent may use money not spent in one election for a future election, i.e. may create a war chest. I characterize the conditions where an incumbent creates a war chest for deterrence. The strongest incumbents do not create the largest war chests since they deter the challenger on their own. It is the weaker incumbents who must create the larger war chests to deter the challenger.

Campaign War Chests and Challenger Quality in Senate Elections

This article presents the first comprehensive analysis of the role of war chests in U.S. Senate elections. Using data on races from 1980 to 2000, I demonstrate the effect of an incumbent senator’s war chest on a campaign. War chests do not deter strong general-election challengers and have an insubstantial or insignificant effect on primary elections, challenger spending, and other electoral variables. Also, war chests are not raised in anticipation of a tough electoral battle but are instead the result of money left over from the previous campaign. From the incumbent’s perspective, the easiest way to get reelected is to run without opposition. Incumbents, then, exert effort to prevent anyone else from running and, failing that, try to deter strong opponents from running, because high-quality challengers win more often than low-quality challengers, even in the same circumstances (Jacobson 1989). Krasno (1994) has argued that the reason senators lose more often than representatives in the U.S. Congress is that senators face higher-quality challengers. For this article, I examined whether or not Senate incumbents can use war chests to affect their odds of winning. Specifically, can a war chest be used to deter quality challengers from entering Senate races? Answering this question contributes to an understanding not only of the Senate, but of the electoral process generally. If we expect to find deterrence anywhere, then it should be in costly Senate campaigns. Furthermore, understanding the role of war chests in Senate races can help us determine the efficacy of campaign finance reforms suggesting that incumbents not be allowed to carry money from one election cycle to the next. In the next section, I review the previous literature on war chests. I then compare existing measures of Senate challenger quality and show which measure explains vote outcomes best. Having operationalized challenger quality, I discuss which factors affect challenger quality, including variables previously suggested by other researchers and I

Dependence Networks and the Diffusion of Domestic Political Institutions

How and to what extent do states influence the level of democracy and autocracy in other states? We argue that states exist internationally in dependence networks with each other and that those networks provide pathways for influence on a state’s domestic institutions. For any given state, a dependence network is a set of partner states with whom it regularly engages in exchanges of valued goods, where those exchanges would be costly to break. We find that an index of three such networks–trade, security and shared international organization membership–significantly influences the domestic political institutions in a given state. These changes are substantively large in the long run, similar in size to regional and global levels of democracy. State capabilities figure heavily in our network measures, thus emphasizing the role of power in the diffusion of domestic political institutions. We also find that network-influenced change works both ways: states can become more autocratic or more democratic.

Effective record linkage for mining campaign contribution data

Up to now, most campaign contribution data have been reported at the level of the donation. While these are interesting, one often needs to have information at the level of the donor. Obtaining information at that level is difficult as there is neither a unique repository of donations nor any standard across existing repositories. In order to more meaningfully mine campaign contribution data, political scientists need an accurate way of grouping, or linking, together donations made by the same donor. In this paper, we describe a record linkage technique that is applicable to various sources and across large geographical areas. We show how it may be effectively applied in the context of nationwide donation data and report on new, previously unattainable results about campaign contributors in the 2007–2008 US election cycle.

War Chests for Deterrence and Savings

I present a model of fund-raising in repeated elections where funds are raised to deter the entry of strong challengers, and to increase the probability of winning through campaign spending. The equilibrium relationship between war chests and incumbent strength is non-monotonic, because incumbents of moderate strength have an incentive to raise enough money to deter strong challengers and to save a large fraction of those funds for use in subsequent election, while stronger incumbents have less incentive to save. Thus, the savings behavior can mask the entry deterrence effect.