A transnational legal order (TLO) authoritatively shapes “the understanding and practice of law” in a specific area of social activity, involving both state and civil society actors, and linking national, regional, and international levels. We argue that a TLO has emerged and settled since 1945 around capital punishment. Our analysis of the death penalty TLO treats “bottom-up” and “top-down” effects as interconnected, addresses the creation of legal order at both national and international levels, and emphasizes the recursivity linking developments at both levels. We trace the development of death penalty abolition from its origins in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Because the practical effects of abolition—in shaping legal and penal practice—necessarily occur at the national level, the analysis focuses on the international, transnational, and domestic factors that lead states to end capital punishment. After describing the emergence of a TLO abolishing the death penalty, we offer a new way of measuring the global and country-specific activities of transnational advocacy groups (Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International). We incorporate that measure in an analysis of data from about 150 countries. The central hypothesis is that making the TLO on capital punishment effective through abolition in national law requires modes of political action that overcome majoritarian public support for retention. We suggest two domestic institutional features that make abolition more likely despite retentionist popular opinion: proportional representation in the legislature and independent courts. We also suggest that transnational non-governmental organizations (NGO) and some regional organizations can support the move to abolish. The data analysis is largely consistent with these propositions and brief case studies illustrate the principal mechanisms.

Although corruption poses fundamental challenges to both democratic governance and market economies, surprisingly little political science research addresses corruption in a comparative context. In this article we explain variation in the perceived level of corruption (defined as the misuse of public office for private gain) across fifty countries. We propose a set of hypotheses that explain variation in corruption levels in terms of domestic political-economic structures, democratic norms, and integration into the international economy. Levels of corruption, we propose, are higher: 1) the greater the extent of state control of the economy, 2) the weaker the democratic norms and values, and 3) the lower the degree of integration into the world economy. The multivariate data analysis broadly confirms our predictions, each of the independent variables is significant in the direction we expected.

Large bodies of research examine why states construct and ratify international legal agreements, yet little research has investigated the conditions under which states are likely to go further and legislate international legal norms into their domestic laws. The question is important, because the creation and ratification of treaties are often not enough for them to work as they are designed to – the enforcement of international law today increasingly depends on states enacting domestic implementing legislation that incorporates international legal rules into their domestic laws. To investigate why they do so, I examine the conditions under which states worldwide have legislated one set of international legal norms into their domestic laws: criminal prohibitions against genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity – also known collectively as “atrocity crimes.” Drawing on research on norm diffusion and professional communities in policymaking, I propose a new theory to explain the spread of these laws. In brief, I argue that the adoption of domestic anti-atrocity laws around the globe since World War II has largely been the result of choices made by technocratic legal experts who were appointed by governments to lead national criminal code reform projects. Though implementing international law has not motivated governments to initiate such reforms in the first place, legal experts have nonetheless used their delegated authority to codify norms – like anti-atrocity laws – that they believed embodied how a “modern” criminal code should look.

To test this theory, I use a multi-method research design. First, using time-series statistical methods and an original dataset I constructed documenting the existence and timing of national criminal laws against genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in every country in the world that has adopted them since World War II, I find strong support for my hypothesis that states that undertake wholesale reforms of their national criminal codes are more likely to adopt national anti-atrocity laws. Second, drawing on interviews and archival research in the field, I conduct an in-depth case study of a particularly puzzling case of atrocity criminalization – Guatemala in 1973 – and find strong support for the causal mechanisms I theorize to be underlying these statistical correlations.

This dissertation consists of three chapters which relate to public officials’ capacity and incentives to improve public services.Chapter 1 examines a setting in which government seeks to augment its capacity by enlisting the private sector. It uses a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to measure the effect of a Liberian school reform which outsourced management of public primary schools to private providers. It finds that outsourced public schools saw learning gains of 0.18 standard deviations in both English and mathematics on average, but the effects varied a lot by private provider. Chapter 2 turns to the question of whether improved public services yield electoral rewards for the officials responsible. It leverages the random variation in learning gains provided by Chapter 1’s randomized school reform in Liberia. On average, voters near treated schools were 3 percentage points less likely to vote for the incumbent party’s candidate than those near control schools. This negative average electoral effect, however, masks important heterogeneity. The negative electoral impact of the reform was concentrated in places where the reform reduced children’s learning. In places where the reform significantly improved test scores, it also produced electoral rewards. Chapter 3 also seeks to measure the electoral gains to public good provision, focusing on the construction of the Interstate Highway System (IHS) in the United States of America. It uses a shift-share estimator to isolate exogenous variation in the timing of IHS construction by county. It finds that a mile of IHS construction in an election year increases county-level vote share for the incumbent governor’s party by 0.6-2.2 percentage points during the period 1950-1972. These essays provide new empirical evidence of democratic accountability for public service provision, even as they illuminate directions for future research into the conditions in which democratic accountability binds.

Early theorists of European integration speculated that economic integration would lead to political integration and a European identity. A European identity has not displaced national identities in the EU, but, for a significant share of EU citizens, a European identity exists alongside a national identity. At the same time, political parties asserting more traditional nationalist identities and policies have directed their dissatisfaction against immigrants, foreigners, and, sometimes, the EU. Those who participate in “Europe” are more likely to develop a European identity, while those whose economic and social horizons are essentially local are more likely to assert nationalist identities. 

On September 6, 2006, President George W. Bush declared that the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” program “has saved lives” and “remains vital to the security of the United States, and our friends and allies.” Yet, the President’s speech marked the closing of the CIA’s secret prisons where detainees had been routinely tortured. By the end of the Bush administration, every component of the torture program had been reformed, replaced, or revoked in a way that more closely aligned with the United States’ international legal obligations. Why did the Bush administration increasingly adhere to the laws governing the treatment of prisoners of war, even though it believed that doing so would constrain its ability to save American lives? More broadly, under what conditions are states most likely to adhere to the anti-torture provisions found in the laws of armed conflict and human rights law during war?

In order to answer these questions, I advance a new theoretical framework, called legalized bureaucratic politics, that emphasizes the degree to which six US national security bureaucracies—the White House Counsel, the National Security Council, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency—have institutionalized international law into their approval process, training, legal advice, and organizational culture. Once the degree of legal institutionalization has been identified, legalized bureaucratic politics involves four steps: intra-agency, inter-agency, operational, and review phase, where adversarial actors will compete for control over wartime management.

I test my theory by comparing two cases where the US used torture: the Vietnam War and the Global War on Terror. My findings show that the US legal institutional structure during the Vietnam War was too weak to eliminate the use of torture by US personnel throughout the war. During the Global War on Terror, the US experienced a medium degree of legal institutionalization, too weak to prevent the torture program from being initiated, but strong enough to reverse it.