My research, which is at the intersection of international relations and public policy, examines how international politics are shaped by states’ domestic politics. By focusing on states as the main unit of analysis, the field of IR has advanced the understanding of how individual countries compete and cooperate with one another in the international system. However, states have internal actors whose disparate preferences, if overlooked, can lead to an incomplete picture of interstate dynamics and decisions. Therefore, in my projects, I build off on and add to extant IR literature by unpackaging domestic politics and investigating how citizens’ preferences are formed and when they change state behaviors at the international level.
Dissertation: Domestic Politics and International Bargaining (two chapters under review)
My dissertation and book project, “Domestic Politics and International Bargaining,” theoretically and empirically explores under what conditions domestic politics affects how leaders bargain in international settings. According to conventional wisdom, a leader’s public statement can help states tackle asymmetric information about resolve and intention, which is a major cause of conflict in international bargaining. This hinges on a strong assumption that citizens dislike broken promises and always politically punish a leader if she reneges on a publicly stated foreign policy commitment. Relaxing the assumption, this project develops a formal model that fully specifies when citizens politically punish their leader and when this punishment makes the leader fulfill her public statement.
In the model, voters form preferences based on not only whether their leader’s actions match her words, but also what policy consequences her actions bring and how complex or salient the policy is to them. The model’s results show that a leader sometimes chooses not to carry out her public statement since voters can both support their leader for backing down and punish her for following through. Comparative statics results also show that as an issue becomes more complex or salient to citizens, they become more supportive of their leader’s decisions. Thus, the model suggests that a leader’s public commitment might not help states overcome asymmetric information––and consequently avoid conflict––in international bargaining. In addition, relating to audience cost theory, while it has been understood that the leader’s public commitments matter in complex high-stakes settings such as international crises, this model suggests that these are the very situations in which audience costs are unlikely to effectively tie leaders’ hands.
In an empirical chapter, I undertake a survey experiment to test four implications derived from the theory. I hypothesize that voters become more supportive of the leader if there is an increase in H1) the policy benefit of the leader’s action, H2) issue complexity, H3) issue salience, or H4) the political punishment cost. The dependent variable is operationalized with survey respondents’ approval for a leader’s actions. Given that I test multiple predictions to draw inference for each hypothesis and for the theory as a whole, I use the non-parametric combination (NPC) method, which uses formal functions to combine relevant tests into a global p-value. The method is also adequate for an analysis with multiple tests since it accounts for potential Type I and II errors. The NPC methods yield strong support for hypotheses regarding the policy benefit and issue complexity. When all hypotheses are combined to draw a global conclusion, the NPC results in a p-value of .0001 and rejects the global null in favor of the overarching theory.
After empirically testing the domestic model of audience costs, I embed it into an international setting to investigate when the leader publicly commits once challenged and how a foreign counterpart perceives such a commitment. The preliminary results show that, contrary to conventional understanding of international bargaining, a leader under certain conditions will back down more often when (s)he commits than when she does not. In such cases, the foreign challenger perceives the leader’s commitment as a sign of a greater likelihood of backing down, thereby escalating a crisis.
Let it Float: Inflation and States’ Priority on Monetary Independence over Exchange Rate Stability (Politics Vol 41. No. 3)
Monetary policy autonomy and exchange rate stability are desirable macroeconomic policies that cannot be attained jointly under internationally mobile capital. In this article, I explore what happens to state choices between the two policies when a key domestic economic challenge rises. Among many factors, increasing inflation directly affects citizens’ daily lives through rising living costs and decreasing purchasing power. Because dissatisfied citizens become more likely to threaten leaders’ tenure in both democracies and nondemocracies, I argue that leaders will pay closer attention to domestically oriented citizens’ interest rather than that of internationally/ export-oriented actors when the inflation rate increases. In other words, to effectively tackle inflation and appease citizens’ discontent, leaders will prioritize their ability to utilize monetary policy over stable exchange rates that promote international trade and investment. As a result, states become more likely to relax exchange rates as the inflation rate increases. Interestingly, empirical results indicate stronger support for hypotheses regarding nondemocratic states.
Working paper 1: Investment Dispute Settlement Mechanism and Political Regimes (under review)
Dispute settlement mechanisms of bilateral investment teaties (BITs) are the last resort safety net for investors to address a host country’s treaty violation. While home governments of investors prefer strong BIT arbitration clauses, host countries who need to give up their control over domestic issues to an independent judicial body may be hesitant to include such clauses. Given that it is costly to offer dispute settle mechanisms, some suggest that democratic host states with existing political and judicial institutions may find it easier to include BIT arbitration clauses. Conversely, others argue that nondemocratic host countries that lack existing institutions will guarantee dispute settlement bodies in BITs more readily to credibly commit to protecting investors' properties. This article builds on both strands of literature and formally explores which types of host countries are willing to include dispute settlement mechanisms in their BITs. The equilibrium results show that, while democratic host states are more likely to offer arbitration clauses, nondemocratic host states tend to offer stronger means to settle disputes. Using a data set of about 1,056 BITs from 1970 to 2006, I empirically test hypotheses derived from the model's implications.
Working paper 2: Threats in Territorial Disputes – Cheap Talk or Escalation?
It is not unusual to see states involved in territorial disputes issue threats to their counterparts. While the status quo control is maintained in most territorial disputes despite such threats as noted by Huth et al. (2015), sometimes countries eventually decide to carry out their threats, leading to armed conflicts. In this project, I model under which condition a threat issued in a given territorial dispute escalates to an armed conflict. Contrary to the conventional wisdom related to audience costs theory, the preliminary result of the model shows that a threat from a democratic leader is less likely to escalate to an actual military action. Another interesting result is that, in case of a less democratic leader (e.g., electoral authoritarianism), the longer the leader has ruled a country, the more likely one is to carry out the threat. While the model’s result is consistent with the democratic peace theory, it is contrary to the audience costs theory which purports that democratic leaders are more likely to carry out their public commitment due to political punishments for backing down. Instead, the model implies that a democratic leader is engaged in a cheap talk quite often.
Working paper 3: Policy Bias and Diversionary Tactics
I explore another commonly assumed voter behavior – the “rally ‘round the flag” effect. This assumption is the basis of an influential IR idea called “diversionary war theory,” which suggests that leaders facing domestic criticism tend to escalate international crises in order to divert domestic attention. In this project, I argue that a leader can gamble for resurrection by using diversionary tactics not only when she cares highly about her office, but also when she has little to lose. Rather than assuming increased public support for the diversionary leader, I allow voters to make decisions based on their calculation of the leader’s marginal political cost. The model’s results show that voters rarely “rally ‘round the flag” when a leader with low support diverts domestic attention to conflicts. As in the dissertation’s model, a state’s foreign policy decision in this paper also results from strategic feedback between voters and their leader.
Working paper 4: Rethinking Multilateralism - Domestic Incentives of Multilateral Aid (under review)
Another way I look into domestic politics to explain leaders’ international choices is to examine the extent to which a leader translates constituents’ preferences into policy decisions when they have well-defined policy positions. In “Rethinking Multilateralism – Domestic Incentives of Multilateral Aid,” I study how responsive economically conservative leaders are to conservative constituents’ aversion to foreign aid. I highlight that donors’ national interests tend to be more strategically tied to bilateral aid than to multilateral aid over which they have less control. Moreover, foreign aid is hardly an important policy that determines the political fate of a leader. Therefore, I argue that if leaders were to implement a foreign aid policy consistent with their constituents’ preferences, they would adjust only multilateral aid. I use panel-corrected standard error (PCSE) for aid commitment, and autoregressive distributed lag (ADL) for aid disbursement to account for potential differences in the short- and long-term impacts. In both analyses, I find that only multilateral types decrease under right-leaning leaders. While some argue that states use multilateral aid to share the burden of assisting less developed countries, this paper suggests that a leader who has multiple issues to handle and has an informational advantage over voters may turn to multilateralism as a way to nominally reflect voter preferences.
Work in progress 1: Within-subject Experimental Design in Political Science
This is a methodological paper in which we discuss the advantages of the within-subject experimental design (e.g. crossover experiment) over the between-subject experimental design (e.g., random vignette study) in political science.
Work in progress 2: Boon or Bane? Domestic Attitude toward Capital-owning Immigrants (IRB Review)
How would citizens react to those who immigrate not with labor but capital as their factor endowment? Since Golden Visa holders bring capital in without joining the labor market, theories based on material concerns should predict that citizens do not oppose, if not welcome, these immigrants. However, if sociotropic arguments are correct, we would see individuals expressing hostility toward a conspicuous influx of these wealthy immigrants despite their financial contribution. To understand individuals’ attitude to immigration flow of capital owners, I perform an online survey experiment in Portugal where there has been a sharp increase in their Golden Visa applications.
Work in progress 3: Who Wants to Arbitrate? Variations in Territorial Dispute Settlement (Building dataset with Arda Yesildag and Tuna Keskin)
Territorial disputes exemplify contentious issues over which states struggle to find a bargaining agreement. In this paper, I investigate why states sometimes deviate from the status quo and bring matters to international courts, despite potential domestic domestic political opposition to the courts’ rulings.
Work in progress 4: Leadership Turnover and Military Alliances (Empirical analysis finished)
According to conventional wisdom, democratic states are better than their nondemocratic counterparts in honoring military alliance commitment. Building on the extant literature, In this paper, I examine whether and how leadership turnovers and tenures affect the way states honor their alliance commitments.
Work in progress 5: Social Enterprise in Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes (with John Park)
In this paper, I study under which conditions social enterprises can affect policy changes in nondemocracies, as opposed to getting sanctioned or co-opted by their governments.
Work in progress 6: The Credibility of Authoritarian Commitments (developing formal model)
I explore how the domestic dynamics between a nondemocratic ruler, elites, and the public condition the credibility of the ruler’s commitments. In doing so, I examine three different domestic partnerships that can be formed amongst the given actors.