Why do democratic governments that support human rights sometimes defy the rulings of international human rights courts? In my dissertation, I examine this question in the context of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a regional court that operates in Latin

America. I argue that non-compliance results from (1) high capacity constraints that limit leaders' ability to comply; and from (2) democratic leaders responding to voter preferences against compliance. Although human rights scholars generally assume that voters support compliance, I find that attitudes toward compliance are not so uniform when the military is implicated. Justice for human rights violations often necessitates confronting the abuses of the past, which some voters would prefer to leave alone. Despite the abuses committed by military officials in recent dictatorships, the military is still a trusted institution in many Latin American states. Leaders thus face a dilemma when they receive judgments from the Inter-American Court: do they follow international law, or do they choose the policies that voters want? I show that the leader's decision to comply is a function of the public's preferences on compliance and the leader's need to be accountable to the public.

I test my theory using an original dataset of all rulings from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights through 2014, measuring compliance using Court-issued monitoring reports. I first show that compliance outcomes at the Inter-American Court are not nearly as bad as critics fear: on the level of an individual order, full compliance is the most likely outcome, occurring 47% of the time. Further, compliance varies by the degree of difficulty of fulfilling the Court's order; states are much more likely to comply with orders of financial reparation and just satisfaction than they are to provide rehabilitative services to victims or guarantee non-repetition of violations. Second, I show that the public's attitudes toward the military moderate the effect of increased need for accountability on the probability of compliance. I measure the leader's need for accountability using two sources of threat to the leader's power: elections and military coups. As the leader's need for accountability increases (i.e., closer to an election or when a military coup is more likely), the leader becomes more responsive to the public's -- as opposed to her own -- preferences. Whether this results in an increased probability of compliance, however, depends on what the public wants. If the public supports compliance, the leader is more likely to comply as the need for accountability increases; however, if the public does not support compliance, the leader is less likely to comply. I further supplement my statistical results with a case-study illustrating variation in amnesty law outcomes in El Salvador and Uruguay. My findings suggest that non-compliance with international law is not necessarily the result of a failure on the part of an international court, but sometimes the result of a failure of preferences for compliance in a democratic public.

After ratifying a human rights treaty, all states are required to incorporate the treaty's standards into domestic law. However, the incorporation of treaty standards varies widely around the world. Why have some states changed their laws to incorporate treaty standards while others have not? I argue that to understand this variation it is necessary to consider how domestic politics affects treaty incorporation. As in other domains of international law, incorporation reflects the strength of rival interest groups in society. I contend that treaty incorporation creates supporters and opponents because human rights treaties can have distributional effects and generate conflict among competing moral values. When groups that oppose incorporation are strong, they can hinder treaty incorporation. I test this argument by examining legislation adopted in Latin America against child labor and child marriage. Making use of two original datasets and over 60 semi-structured interviews with civil society leaders, legislators, and representatives of international organizations in six Latin American countries, I show that groups that oppose human rights treaties can undermine their incorporation. This is important as it suggests a previously unexplored reason for some states' failure to incorporate human rights treaties: governments' response to domestic political pressure. As incorporation is often a first step towards compliance, this dissertation contributes theoretically and empirically to the analysis of the causal mediating steps between treaty ratification and compliance.

A growing number of increasingly authoritarian states, such as the Russian Federation, People’s Republic of China, Hungary and Turkey, have spent the better part of the 21st century seeking to challenge the existing international order. These efforts have broadly centered around undermining existing international norms and molding new ones better suited to their governance models. The most prominent example of these authoritarian backed challenges to the "Old Order" came on February 24, 2022 as Russian missiles landed in Kyiv in what became the opening salvo of the first full-scale interstate conflict on the European Continent since 1945. However, even prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its status in the international community over the past decade was as precarious as it was contentious. The 2014 annexation of Crimea directly challenged almost 50 years’ worth of international legal norms and jurisprudence developed in the aftermath of World War II through its participation (or lack-thereof) in international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). While the Russian Federation is far from the only authoritarian actor seeking to reshape the international system, this dissertation seeks to examine how – in both the international and domestic political sphere – these states have ushered in a "New Normal" for international relations. Building on Ginsburg (2020) and the growing prevalence of "authoritarian international law" that has in many ways typified authoritarian states challenges to the post-1945 international system, this dissertation first focuses on autocratic regimes’ increasing obstruction of international organizations such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) from expanding and crystalizing international legal norms that have served as staples of the "traditional" world order. Following this examination of authoritarian driven shifts in the international legal system this research demonstrates how domestic politics in both autocratic and democratic states in the form of differing public preferences toward crisis bargaining could potentially help explain the recent emergence of significant interstate conflict in an international system that for the most part had been devoid of such wars since 1945. Finally this work closes by providing the reader with an in-depth qualitative examination of just how domestic institutions in autocratic regimes such as the Russian Federation have contributed to the establishment of a "New Normal" by altering interactions in supranational norm building organizations such as the ECHR. Despite this project’s extensive focus on Russia, such approaches could also be applied to several other contexts. While this would require additional data collection that is not described here (should it be possible) it might provide some broader conclusions about how domestic judiciaries impact international organizations like the ECHR in the world more broadly. As a whole, the questions mentioned throughout this dissertation represent a broad overview of attempts to study the impact of the shifting international order on international human rights courts, specifically the ECHR. As such this dissertation makes a novel contribution to the study of a shifting international order and its impacts in the human rights arena and will hopefully help foster similar research on other countries or even other contexts or international bodies like the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

This dissertation studies the determinants of political institutions and their impact on economic development in various historical contexts. The first chapter asks: Why did the Catholic Church’s power decline earlier in Northwestern Europe than in the East and South? I argue that differential demand for collective security in the face of the possible invasion by the “infidels” was an important factor in the Church-state relations. Catholic states had to cooperate to achieve military success and, therefore, delegated legal and fiscal authorities to the Church. To measure the Church’s political power, I have assembled a novel dataset on appointments of bishops between 1198 and 1517. I find that in the dioceses located closer to the “infidels,” bishops were differentially more likely to be selected by the pope or cathedral chapters than by secular rulers.

The second chapter examines the economic origins of discrimination against Jewish entrepreneurs in the Russian Empire. Several changes in government policy between 1889 and 1894 freed large amounts of domestic private capital that now had to be reinvested in the equity market. I explore the relationship between anti-Jewish restrictions in the equity market, that began in 1890, and capital intensity of manufacturing industries. Using the RUSCORP database of all manufacturing corporations created in 1891–1902 and novel data on all Russian factories in 1890, I find a positive association between capital intensity and the probability of restrictions.

In the third and final chapter, I study the role of labor mobility restrictions, that existed under serfdom, in shaping economic development. In the Russian Empire, twenty-three million people, who were serfs in 1858 and were not allowed to move to cities, were freed by 1870. I develop a structural model of rural-urban migration incorporating restrictions on mobility, features of the countryside and cities, and the travel costs. I estimate this model using novel detailed data on peasants, cities, and railroads in 1811–1910. The estimated parameters suggest that construction of railroads was the single most important factor explaining rural-urban migration. This is likely because allocation of rural labor was not efficient historically, independently from the impact of serfdom.