WORKING PAPERS
A Relational Approach to Issue Linkage: Evidence from Environmental Linkages in American Trade Agreements
Who supports issue linkage? Governments increasingly promote climate and environmental standards using trade agreements. The literature suggests that linking these issues can create mutual benefits for negotiating governments and environmental groups that might otherwise oppose trade liberalization. However, not all groups trust the government to enforce the environmental provisions of trade agreements. Using an original dataset on environmental groups’ positions on U.S. trade–environment linkages, I show that environmental groups support trade–environment linkages only when they have extensive ties to intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) that can help provide compliance information and ensure the enforcement of environmental provisions. In contrast, environmentalists in multi-issue coalitions with other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are less likely to support trade–environment linkages despite the potential environmental gains they offer, as such quid pro quo may undermine their coalition partners’ agendas. I offer a quantitative analysis of the linkage positions of 32 environmental groups from 2002 to 2023 and case studies based on archival and secondary sources. The findings indicate that the relational capital of non-state actors can significantly impact international cooperation, especially as the traditional boundaries between high and low politics become less distinct
Geopolitical Overtake: The Political Psychology of LGBT+ Norm Diplomacy with Jongwoo Jeong. Winner of the 2023 APSA Centennial Center Summer Research Grant, Women & Politics Fund.
Western democracies have used public diplomacy to diffuse liberal norms to non-Western countries. How do these efforts transform a target state's perception of the sender? Emphasizing the high politics of security, a prominent theory suggests that norm diffusion is more likely between countries with positive strategic relations. We investigate this diffusion dynamic in the context of the US’s public diplomacy for LGBT+ rights in South Korea, a most-likely case for the diffusion theory. Challenging the relational diffusion thesis, we propose two alternative mechanisms through which norm diplomacy may reshape or reinforce geopolitical relations without achieving norm diffusion. The gender prime theory contends that exposure to an ally's pro-LGBT+ signal may lead individuals to redefine friends and enemies based on preexisting LGBT+ norms. The geopolitical overtake theory posits that pro-LGBT+ diplomacy between geopolitical friends may strengthen existing geopolitical divides, while overshadowing the norm message. Using a mixed methods approach, we find evidence supporting the geopolitical overtake theory, based on a survey experiment on the South Korean mass public and an observational study. This paper shows that norm diffusion among allies is as much compounded by underlying geopolitical subtexts as it is among enemies.
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
Conditional Effects of the Spotlight: Electoral Institutions and the Enforcement of Global Corporate Norms. International Studies Quarterly (2024).
Under what conditions do governments discipline powerful multinational companies for breaching global corporate norms? Existing IR theories have shown that peer monitoring and transnational advocacy are crucial strategies that shine a spotlight on norm violations. Despite the importance of those strategies, governments in the Global North have not consistently condemned their home-grown multinational companies for breaking norms related to climate or human rights in the Global South. This paper argues that the effect of such spotlighting is crucially moderated by electoral institutions, and legislators in proportional representation systems are more likely than those in majoritarian systems to push multinational companies to comply with global norms when such issues are in the spotlight. I find supporting evidence from the OECD Guidelines’ Specific Instance process and case studies. This article shows that traditional strategies to promote norm compliance, such as transnational advocacy and peer pressure, work differently in different countries, and electoral systems in the Global North can have unintended distributional consequences for norm beneficiaries. Link
Environmental issue linkage as an electoral advantage: the case of NAFTA. Review of International Political Economy (2021): 1-28.
Why would some legislators alter their votes on trade agreements in return for environmental side agreements that may be hard to enforce? While numerous studies have examined the effects of side agreements, few have evaluated their impact on legislators’ positions on a trade agreement over time. This paper examines the effects of the environmental side deal attached to NAFTA, with novel time-series survey data that captures the evolution of House members’ positions on NAFTA during discussion and finalization of the environmental side of the free trade agreement. I find that pro-environmental legislators in safe districts tended to withdraw their support for NAFTA once the side deal was agreed upon, whereas those in competitive districts stood their ground and increased their support in the final stage of voting. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I find little evidence that the side deal assuaged legislators in import-competing districts. This article shows how the effectiveness of international institutions is moderated in important ways by electoral considerations. Link
Experience, communication, and collective action: financial autonomy and capital market development in East Asia. New Political Economy (2022): 27-5, 731-753. with Yong Wook Lee
From the creation of the eurozone to the African Financial Markets Initiative, the world has seen the emergence of regional financial institutions in recent decades. East Asia is no exception. ASEAN plus Three (China, Japan, and Korea) has institutionalised the Asian Bond Marked Initiative (ABMI) since 2003. What explains the development of the ABMI? We argue that East Asian states established it as an institutional mechanism for regional financial autonomy constrained by their dependence on Western financial market. In making this argument, we propose an experience-communication analytical framework to systematically investigate the formation of collective economic interests. We show that the analytical framework captures the timing and the content of the institutional evolution of the ABMI with greater precision. To demonstrate our claim, we attempt to make best use of both qualitative process tracing and quantitative collocational analysis for the validity and reliability of our claim. Particular attention is paid to analysing the politics of inclusion and exclusion in membership as ASEAN plus Three states shifted the forum for regional bond market cooperation from the APEC, of which the United States is a member, to the ABMI, which excludes the United States in pursuing regional financial autonomy. Link
Does the U.S. Congress Respond to Public Opinion in Trade? American Politics Research (2023). with Michael Pomirchy & Bryan Schonfeld
Are U.S. legislators responsive to public opinion on trade? Despite the prevalence of preference-based approaches to international trade, not much work has directly assessed the relationship between constituency opinion and positioning by members of Congress on trade bills. We assess dynamic responsiveness (whether shifting constituency opinion on trade yields corresponding changes among legislators) by exploiting an original dataset on the positions of members of Congress on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) at various points leading up to the November 1993 roll-call vote. We find no evidence of dynamic responsiveness to shifting constituency opinion on even a highly salient piece of trade legislation. We provide qualitative evidence that interest group influence may instead be the predominant source of shifting legislator positioning on trade. Link
POLICY CONTRIBUTIONS
Does Attaching Environmental Issues to Trade Agreements Boost Support for Trade Liberalisation?
In this policy op-ed published by Bruegel, I argue that the omission of environmental issues in the new U.S.-E.U. trade talks may have negative effects on ratification of the new trade deal in the European Parliament. I analyze whether pro-climate individual Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) withheld their support for the streamlined trade talks. To control for their baseline attitudes on issue linkage, I include their stances on the TTIP, which had extensive mandates to negotiate provisions on climate change. All else equal, if an MEP is not supportive of a stronger climate policy, the MEP is predicted to support the trade talks without environmental mandates, with a likelihood of 83%. However, the predicted probability of approval drops to 40% if the MEP supports a stronger climate policy in line with the Paris Agreement. Link