"Networked Trust: Global Policing and the Politics of Securing Trade." Accepted at the American Political Science Review (APSR).
Abstract: States routinely exchange sensitive information to manage issues of mutual concern, but doing so entails the risk that partners defect from the terms of the arrangement, which can deter cooperation from occurring to begin with. Existing research emphasizes the palliative role of international organizations in mitigating this dilemma. This article argues instead that, in domains characterized by secrecy, government agencies may instead rely on their existing social networks to determine who to trust with sensitive information. I develop and probe this theory of "networked trust'' in the context of cooperation among border agencies to secure global trade. The findings, based on an inferential network analysis using original data on bilateral agreements that regularize the exchange of criminal intelligence between customs agencies, combined with elite interviews, show how specific features of the social context in which dyads are embedded may provide valuable information that mitigates mistrust and facilitates cooperation. The argument advances our understanding of how informal networks may facilitate cooperation when formal oversight and enforcement are limited.
"Peer Pressure and the Competitive Diffusion of Trusted Trader Agreements." Accepted at International Studies Quarterly (ISQ).
Abstract: States increasingly cooperate to regulate the movement of goods moving through global supply chains. One way they do so is through little-studied agreements that mutually recognize each other’s “trusted traders” —firms certified as low-risk and entitled to expedited passage across borders. Since 2007, 49 countries have signed 148 trusted trader agreements worldwide. Why and how have these agreements proliferated? I argue that states sign trusted trader agreements under competitive pressures to avoid costly time delays at borders, and that those pressures are conditioned by the quantity and composition of a state’s existing third-party ties. I evaluate this network theory of competitive diffusion using newly assembled data and an event history model. The paper advances work on policy diffusion by demonstrating how network structure endogenously reconfigures strategic incentives.
Working Papers
"Network Capital in Complex Regimes: Social Position and Access to Multilateral Climate Finance" (with Ayse Kaya)
Abstract: How does the structure of a regime complex shape states’ access to international organizations (IOs) that provide critical goods, like multilateral climate finance? We conceptualize and measure regime complexes as networks of collaborating IOs to which recipient states are linked through financing relationships. We argue that existing IO partners supply recipient states with network capital—information about other IOs in the complex conveyed to the recipient, as well as information about the recipient conveyed to other IOs in the regime. We hypothesize that this network capital improves states’ ability to form new relationships. Existing partners’ collaboration networks define the reach of this informational advantage, such that recipients should be more likely to form ties with their partners’ collaborators, and those linked to more connected partners should form more new relationships overall. Using an original dataset of project-level collaboration in multilateral climate finance covering 142 recipients and 22 financing organizations from 2013 to 2023, we find support for both expectations. Neither pattern holds for reactivated relationships, consistent with information being most valuable when recipients and IOs lack shared experience. These new ties are consequential: they expand both the amount and the scope of financing available to recipients, without displacing existing partners, and typically develop into continuing financing relationships. By bridging social network analysis and the study of regime complexity, this article expands our understanding of the distributive consequences of inter-IO collaboration.
Abstract: Does the revelation of state secrets help generate a resolved public? Governments increasingly declassify and publicize intelligence to rally public support for costly foreign policy, including military action. Yet the disclosure of intelligence carries well-known risks---compromising sources and methods---while its potential benefits are uncertain. We argue that revealing secrets manufactures resolve by lending claims unique credibility, which could come from the information itself, its secrecy, its state source, or the act of formal authorization. We test this theory in a two-stage survey experiment (N=4000), where we vary whether and how information reaches the public—through an authorized disclosure, a leak, a private firm, or a think tank—to find out whether intelligence disclosures are especially persuasive. We further ask whether disclosure narrows partisan gaps in cue responsiveness and whether its persuasiveness depends on trust in the intelligence community. The study offers key insights about elite persuasion, resolve, and secrecy in international politics.
Works in Progress
Networked Borders: The Post-9/11 Transformation of Border Governance (book project)
“Foreign Aid at the Border: Public Response to Donated Security Infrastructure” with Michael R. Kenwick
Abstract: How do publics respond to foreign aid at their borders? Existing research has found that attributed aid can improve views of the donor without eroding support for the recipient government, but this evidence comes almost entirely from development assistance. We argue that the effect of aid depends on the function it supports and is most likely to backfire where aid supplies a core state function. We examine this argument in the case of border control, where the United States and China increasingly compete to supply states with scanners that inspect goods and people at ports of entry, often as foreign aid. Such aid may signal improved governing capacity to secure the border and facilitate trade and travel, generating goodwill as the aid literature expects. Yet states invest in their borders to display their capacity to govern, not just to regulate what crosses them. Visibly foreign-supplied equipment may undercut that display, instead signaling compromised state control and raising concerns about outsourced sovereignty. We test these competing expectations with survey experiments in three recipient countries. The study will provide new evidence on foreign aid, great-power competition over digital infrastructure, and the politics of border control.
"Intelligence Disclosure in Historical Perspective: How the U.S. Wielded Evidence of Wrongdoing during the Cold War" Undergraduate RAs: Sasha Draeger and Akayla Siddiqi
When do states reveal intelligence about other states’ transgressions? Governments guard their intelligence closely, yet sometimes they choose to make it public. The Kennedy administration showed U-2 photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba at the UN. In the months before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Washington and London declassified Moscow’s war plans to rally allies and deny the Kremlin a pretext for invasion. Existing theories explain these choices to reveal or conceal through the need to protect sources and methods, limit escalation, and coerce adversaries, but they rest largely on a few cases, many from nuclear proliferation. This project builds a systematic dataset of U.S. disclosure deliberations across all issue areas and audiences. Using computational text analysis, it searches the roughly 140,000 Cold War–era documents in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series for cases in which U.S. officials held intelligence about another state’s transgression. Each case is then coded for whether officials disclosed it, to whom, how much evidence they showed, and why.