Research Interests

My substantive research interests include international law, international organization, norms, cooperation, political psychology, the politics of crisis, and policy diffusion. Methodologically, my projects include work which uses text as data, machine learning, survival modeling, interviews, and case studies. Beyond my research on treaty exit, I am interested in interdisciplinary collaboration to better understand the politics of crisis, especially the role of internal and external pressure in influencing decision-making, and in research that informs policy.

COVID-19 State Policy Project

Collaborating with a team of other political scientists and public health researchers, I documented the introduction of social distancing policies in US states in real time, creating the COVID-19 State Policy Project .  This policy database is used by a wide number of researchers, companies, and policy makers, including the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) COVID-19 model, culminating in a collaborative publication in Nature Medicine.. We also tested the determinants of social distancing policy introduction, finding that partisanship was the strongest predictor of policy timing. This research was published in Perspectives on Politics (forthcoming), the Journal of Health and Public Policy Law, and State Policy & Politics Quarterly (forthcoming).

The Effects of Exit

My dissertation examines how the interaction of state-specific factors and treaty-specific factors influences exit from international agreements.  Still left on the table is the effect of treaty withdrawal on the treaties and organizations experiencing exit. I examine the effect of withdrawal on treaty effectiveness through examining how withdrawal affects dues payments, meeting attendance, and progress toward treaty goals.

Oppression and Resistance Lab

Conflict presents the opportunity to better understand how both intra and intergroup pressures influence actor behavior amid crisis.  As part of the Oppression and Resistance Lab, I worked with a team of researchers to use social media data to better understand the behavior of militant groups during the Syrian civil war. I developed an ontology to identify the use of weapons of mass effect (WME) within domestic conflict and trained undergraduates on best research practices. I have three co-authored related working papers— a theoretical paper, a data release, and an article on the pedagogy of the lab— available upon request.

Treaty Legalization

Treaties vary based on their signatories and subject matter, but also on their degree of legalization. Some treaties more narrowly delineate the behavior permitted under the agreement than do others. To better understand how differences in treaty legalization affect exit, I used supervised machine learning to label 30,000 treaties on their degree of precision, obligation, delegation and flexibility, greatly expanding our large-n empirical knowledge of treaty legalization. Beyond my dissertation, I plan to use this to examine how broader questions in the study of international law, in particular how different elements of legalization influence treaty commitment, longevity, and effectiveness, as well as variation in state preferences for legalization.