Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This study involves an experiment with 77 law students. It looks at the seprarability of preferences in cases involving multiple issues. I investigate whether decision-makers are able to separate their views on divisive policy matters from a seemingly neutral “threshold” decision they are asked to make in a complex case. Specifically, participants were given a mock legal brief containing identical legal arguments on both sides of a standing dispute. All participants were told that the issue arose in the context of a case where the issues of (1) abortion (2) free speech and (3) restrictions on the political expression of public employees were potentially salient in the dispute on the merits. The experiment involved a 2 x 2 factorial design where the content of the political expression at issue (pro-life vs. pro-choice) and the jurisdiction the case arose in (jurisdiction with direct authority on the standing issue vs. without direct authority on the standing issue) were experimentally controlled. Participants’ policy views were measured to test how they influenced the threshold standing decision. Findings demonstrate participants were able to separate views on abortion and restrictions on public employees from the standing decision. Opinions on free speech, however, did influence the standing decision a direction consistent with attitudinal hypotheses. The effect was more pronounced for participants in treatment conditions with no controlling legal authority on the standing issue.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The following is a draft chapter from a manuscript entitled Peacekeeping and the
Peacekept: Maintaining Peace After Civil War. The book examines peacekeeping in civil
conflicts in the post-Cold War era. It combines quantitative and case study analysis to examine
several empirical questions: where do peacekeepers get sent? do they make peace more likely to
last, all else equal? and if so, how do they do so – what are the causal mechanisms linking the
presence of peacekeepers to more enduring peace? It is this last question that the chapter
presented here addresses.
In an earlier theory chapter, I note that despite a now rather vast literature on
peacekeeping, we do not have a strong causal theory of how exactly peacekeepers make a
difference. Many studies discuss the functions of peacekeeping (monitoring, interposition, etc.)
without spelling out explicitly what the presence of peacekeepers changes from the perspective
of the belligerents themselves, the “peacekept” that would make them less likely to return to war.
I argue that civil war may resume through four possible causal pathways (or some combination
thereof): outright aggression; security dilemmas spirals driven by fear and uncertainty; accidents
or “involuntary defection” by rogue elements within either side; political exclusion that drives
the politically losing side back to war. The theory chapter spells out specific causal mechanisms
through which peacekeepers might interfere with any of these pathways, thereby making peace
more likely to last. The following chapter examines three cases, covering attempts to maintain
peace both with and without peacekeepers, to evaluate whether and how these causal
mechanisms operate.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This article seeks to explain the influence of the democratic-peace thesis on politics by offering a new understanding of theory: as a hermeneutical mechanism of attaching meaning to political concepts. The hermeneutical mechanism is understood as a three-stage metatheoretical model in which theoretical constructions transform into social conventions and then into political convictions. By using discourse-tracing—analyzing the process in which the theoretical discourse was transformed into political discourse—the article explores two case studies in which the democratic-peace thesis played a political role: the Israeli Right and its criticism of the Oslo accords, and the American neoconservatives and their policies in the Middle East. The metatheoretical model that developed here advances our understanding of theory as offering a holistic understanding of reality, rather than a mere limited explanation of specific phenomena; highlights theory’s involvement in real-world politics; and emphasizes theory’s political capital, with the resulting moral responsibility of theoreticians.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: Two problems, one data-driven one theory driven limit the study of campaign effects. First, it is difficult to separate who voters chose and why from who they would have chosen and why they made that choice had there been no campaign. This is the relevant comparison and most data are simply inappropriate for answering this question because they do not observe how an individual behaved without the campaign. Second, even though we know that campaign effects stem from both persuasion (changing the content of a voter’s attitude ) and heresthetic change or priming (changing the weights applied to or salience of specific determinants of vote choice), there have been nearly no attempts to undercover the underlying psychological mechanisms that lead voters to change which determinants they rely on. In this paper I draw on the recent controversy surrounding the different forms of attitude strength (Miller and Peterson 2004), to suggest that changes in citizens’ uncertainty are the key mediator of campaign effects. The results suggest that persuasion and changes in uncertainty but not ambivalence or importance are responsible for the changes in voters’ decisions during the campaign.