The World Bank’s Inspection Panel was the first accountability mechanism of its kind at an international finance institution. The Panel was created in response to civil society protests regarding the human rights violations that were increasing in frequency because of Bank-funded projects. Since its inception in 1993, the Inspection Panel has received over 160 complaints citing concerns about project implementation and design. The central question of this thesis surfaced when it became apparent that, despite the Panel’s promises to address the concerns of communities adversely affected by Bank-funded projects, the Panel has taken decisive action in a concerningly low number of cases. There is a clear gap between the Panel’s mandate and the actions that it took. But why? As such, the question emerged: What determines how cases move through the World Bank’s Accountability Mechanism complaint process? Through a combination of case studies and Panel data, supplemented by interviews with Accountability Counsel staff members and a former Inspection Panel member, I argue that both time and civil society organization (CSO) involvement were significant factors that influenced a complaint’s mobility through the Panel’s process. The thesis found that, while these factors could play a role, ultimately, it boils down to the whims of the World Bank’s Management, who are heavily involved in the Inspection Panel process despite the Panel’s design as an independent body. Management’s overt involvement in the Panel’s process severely undermines the ability of the Panel to practice its mandate and blurs the necessary lines of separation between the Panel and the Bank. This major finding raises concerns on the practice of accountability at these institutions and highlights the need for the Panel, and the Bank, to amend the ways in which communities can seek redress within its walls. Evidently, the Inspection Panel still has a long way to go in the way of meeting its original mandate.

The Peacebuilding Commission was created in 2005 to close an institutional gap in the UN. It was designed as a member-state body that would work to prevent catastrophic failure and also address what should be done once a crisis had been averted or violent conflict had come to an end. While the literature provides some assessment of the PBC’s impact in individual cases or areas, it has failed to evaluate the impact of the 2015 reform effort, which caused to significant and fundamental shift in the PBC’s operation. This thesis evaluates how this shift in operations changed both the form and substance of PBC engagement, examining both broad trends in the PBC’s agenda and work and its impact in specific contexts, using the cases of Liberia and Burkina Faso. It finds a pattern of broader-but-shallower engagement, with a consistently expanding agenda that covers a broader range of cases in addition to more thematic work, but less investment and ultimately less impact in individual cases. The post-2015 format of the PBC was less able to provide the sustained, high-investment, and long-term engagement that could support a strategic or advisory role or encourage political buy-in. However, the lighter form of engagement did allow the PBC to cover a greater range of cases and topics, and in “easier” cases a higher-investment form of engagement was likely not as necessary. Still, these findings have implications for continuing efforts to reform and improve the PBC, particularly given the number of difficult and complex cases currently on the agenda.

In the aftermath of the neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s, much of Latin America was in the midst of a crisis. Faced with increasing popular discontent about rampant economic and racial inequality, governments across the region encountered unprecedented challenges to their legitimacy. Excluded for centuries from processes of political contestation, many Indigenous and Afro-Latin communities found themselves subject to cycles of impoverishment, isolation, and predation. Appearing in tandem with these systems of exclusion was mestizaje, the independence-era racial doctrine that allowed for the simultaneous praise of theoretical diversity for the sake of national unity and the quotidian discrimination against nonwhites on account of their perceived barbarism. Using the language of mestizaje to cloak political discourse in multiculturalism, policymakers in the 20th century promoted the whitening of their national image. After facing mass popular uprisings against the racial status quo, countries from Bolivia to Ecuador to Colombia made concerted efforts to excise mestizaje thought from their legal systems in the 1990s and 2000s. In its place, they instituted plurinationalism, a constitutional principle that recognizes the distinct cultural and economic traditions of ethnic minorities and devolves power to certain communities to protect those heritages. Part of those reforms is the right to administer the land on which the communities reside, which often possesses abundant natural resources. In the years since plurinational constitutions were drafted, though, questions about the implementation of autonomy for minority communities remain. In this thesis, I investigate the factors that enable rural Indigenous communities to defend themselves from incursions into their territory by the state, extractive corporations, and guerillas. I utilize a case study approach, selecting two Indigenous communities each from Colombia and Bolivia, two of the countries with the most robust foundations for plurinational execution. My methodology uses deforestation levels as a proxy for the success of these defensive maneuvers, setting a baseline for the robustness of the country’s plurinational reforms. I then call on research from anthropology, political science, and economics to understand the complex processes of politicization, power, and identity that surround the conflict in each case study. I find that both the Colombian and Bolivian examples provide important insights into the strengths of plurinational legal systems, but are vulnerable to political and economic threats. The resulting unpredictability allows only the Indigenous communities with high political unity and connections to national-level advocacy organizations to actively overcome the administrative hurdles put between them and autonomous recognition. In order to make plurinational autonomy more accessible to more Indigenous communities, plurinational constitutions require supportive legal scaffolding, robust state protections against corporate and illicit interests, and powerful Indigenous political organizations. This thesis will contribute to existing literature by extending analysis beyond a single community, drawing comparisons between the Colombian and Bolivian cases to understand how future plurinational reforms can be implemented to protect autonomous Indigenous enclaves from outside threats.

The United States has not avoided the global democratic recession of the Twenty-First Century. Democratic degradation has taken hold at the federal level, but also, more subtly at the subnational level, where state governments have engaged in increasingly blatant anti-democratic action, cheered on by partisans in other states and at the national level. Gerrymandering, voting restrictions, and corrupt and legally questionable partisan action have become more common, accompanied by an atmosphere of political polarization and deep fear at the implications of opposition victory. This thesis approaches the interplay between subnational democratic degradation in the United States and partisan polarization, analyzing the degree to which levels of political polarization in any given state predict the quality of democracy, and any shifts thereof, in that state. The primary hypothesis was that increased levels of polarization would correlate with lower democratic quality, as parties in government, fearing their opposition taking power, would impose anti-democratic measures to maintain their government. The findings show little correlation between polarization and the quality of democracy. Political polarization increased in a largely linear fashion during the 2000 to 2018 period, while quality of democracy decreased slightly in a largely linear fashion over the same period in the vast majority of states. The exceptions were states where the party dominant in state government changed during the 2000 to 2018 period, with states that transitioned from Democratic- to Republican-controlled seeing significant democratic degradation, while states that transitioned from Republican- to Democratic-controlled saw significant improvement in quality of democracy. Analysis of the specific case of democratic degradation in Wisconsin suggests Republican party influence prompts such degradation. This raises further questions on the effects of partisan control of the post-Census redistricting process on state democracy, partisan transition and democracy more broadly, and the actual motivations behind state-level anti-democratic behavior.

The Meta Oversight Board has become a hallmark of innovative private governance and platform accountability. This independent, quasi-judicial body created to check Meta’s content policies and practices features some of the world’s most esteemed experts in human rights and governance. Less talked about is its public comment process as a means for engaging those beyond the Board. While there has been much scholarly work on public participation in government processes, there is less understanding of its role within the context of private tech governance and online content regulation. In this thesis, I apply a mixed-methods approach to investigate the role of public comment in Meta Oversight Board decision-making. I undertake 1) a quantitative analysis of public comments submitted to the Meta Oversight Board in conjunction with the outcomes of the Board’s recommendations, and 2) a qualitative analysis of interviews I conducted with internal Board members and staff and civil society stakeholders. I find that currently, there is no observable relationship between public comment engagement, whether as a whole or from civil society, and the effectiveness of Board recommendations. However, as revealed through my interviews, public comments indeed help the Board build more informed decisions and increase the legitimacy of these decisions. Additionally, internal and external Board stakeholders agree that the barriers to Board engagement, whether via public comment or otherwise, must be lowered to truly foster an inclusive, collaborative engagement process. Finally, I identify key weaknesses in the Board’s transparency efforts when it comes to meaningfully communicating its impact to stakeholders. In sum, my findings suggest a need for the Board to more closely consider how it actualizes its values of transparency, accountability, and accessibility as it pertains to its relationship with external stakeholders, particularly civil society.

The Afghan Local Police (ALP) was the most robust local defense mobilization effort used in the War in Afghanistan. Funded by the United States and under the purview of the Afghan government, The ALP program aimed at fostering self-defense among local communities while reinforcing the authority of traditional governance institutions. Active from 2010-2020, the program amassed a force of 34,000 men, composed over 8% of the Afghan National Security force, cost the US government $1.2 billion, and even gained a reputation as the American “exit strategy”. Still, little quantitative work has been done to assess how the Afghan Local Police lived up to its ambitious goals of establishing sustainable political order in the countryside. Moreover, only anecdotal evidence provides insight into the ALP's impact on the lives of individual villagers. In this thesis, I build a theory integrating the Afghan Local Police with governance, security, and economic development outcomes. To explore this theory, I measure variables such as nightlight radiance, (a proxy for economic development) and survey data on support for the local government and belief in the local government’s ability to maintain security. I find that, despite originally aspiring to be a crucial part of the local governance and security strategy, the Afghan Local Police failed to correlate with any of these outcomes. I conclude by contextualizing these findings in the broader War in Afghanistan, highlighting how the international coalition's disregard for rural areas contributed to the Taliban's eventual takeover.

This thesis investigates how socioeconomically vulnerable individuals in Santiago de Chile conceptualize and exercise their citizenship in the wake of the 2019 estallido social. Using qualitative analysis of 31 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the study develops a grounded theory of “fragmented citizenship.” Fragmentation refers to the asymmetrical and often contradictory experiences of citizenship at the individual level in contexts where the state is highly visible but uneven in its provision of services, programs, and goods. Beyond the convergence of these structural conditions of the state—wide visibility and irregular presence—the study found that participants’ multidimensional ideals of citizenship exacerbate fragmentation by setting high expectations of state provision. Fragmentation, in turn, shapes citizens’ engagement with the state, with respondents more likely to exercise their citizenship in areas where they perceive the state to be functioning effectively. Conversely, participants described strategic disengagement from the state and their citizenship where they perceived it to be less fully and reliably realized, further contributing to fragmentation. Through a nuanced and timely ground-level analysis, this thesis builds upon prior research on how citizenship plays out in practice in Latin America to provide valuable insight into the crisis of democracy in Chile and beyond, examining the implications of high citizen expectations coupled with uneven state performance for democratic citizenship.

Over the last three decades, Mexico has undergone two radical changes. With the dawn of a new millennia, Vicente Fox of the opposition National Action Party (PAN) was elected as the nation’s chief executive. Through his victory, Mexico transitioned from seventy years of single party rule under the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) to a democratic system that persists to this day. At the same time, however, the smuggling of narcotics across the country’s northern border fueled the rise of violent drug cartels that threaten political stability. In this thesis, I seek to examine the forces of these seemingly unrelated events in four different ways. First, I provide a survey of existing literature pertaining to the topic. Second, I develop a game theory framework that explains how drug cartels evolved from small bandits to transnational operations capable of challenging the state. Third, using a multivariable regression, I delve into the effects of Mexico’s democratic transition on the criminal world, advancing a new approach to measure the presence of drug cartels. Finally, I invert the relationship to determine the impact of drug cartels on democracy—namely, the influence of drug cartels on electoral patterns. I find that Mexico’s transition had a significant impact on criminal activity as measured by drugs seized by the state. Furthermore, I show that drug cartels tacitly influence electoral results across all parties. In the end, this thesis shows the growing relationship between drug cartels and the state, suggesting these two are closely interconnected despite of common misconceptions. 

The Global Financial Crisis and its aftershocks have substantially altered the Western European political landscape. But while the literature has extensively focused on the impacts of the economic hardship on traditional party competition, it has often failed to consider the center-periphery dimension. This thesis addresses both the demand for and supply of regionalist ideologies during the crisis. Using an original dataset containing 8 countries, 35 regions, and 128 regionalist parties, it finds that voters did not increase their support for regionalist parties during the crisis and may have even turned their backs on these political actors. In addition, I consider the reactions of regionalist parties in three Spanish autonomous communities, Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia, to the crisis. I find evidence of regionalist mobilization on the issue and even some indications of radicalization of regionalist demands. Taken together, these findings raise interesting implications for the impacts of the financial crisis and the interaction between economic indicators, party competition, and voting patterns.

Spain’s transition to democracy has long been considered a prime example of the successful stabilization and consolidation of democracy. This success was long attributed to a decision at the time of the transition to leave the past behind, to forego any efforts towards truth, reconciliation, or justice regarding the crimes and human rights violations committed during the country’s civil war (1936-1939) and the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). Instead, an Amnesty Law, colloquially referred to as the Pact of Forgetting, was passed by the new Spanish parliament. However, this pact to ignore the past has hardly existed in perpetuity. In the last 20 years, Spain’s violent and controversial past has re-emerged as a topic of political debate, most recently in the form of a proposal for a new Democratic Memory Law currently under debate in Spain’s parliament. In this thesis, I investigate Spain’s relationship to its controversial past through the lens of a key vehicle for establishing collective memory: education. Specifically, I seek to understand how and to what extent Spanish secondary school students in Madrid, Barcelona, and Sevilla learn about the Spanish Civil War, Franco dictatorship, and the country’s transition to democracy. An online survey on the coverage of these periods in the classroom was sent to secondary school history teachers across the three aforementioned cities in Spain, at both public and private institutions. The survey was available between January and March of 2022 and received 132 responses. Ultimately, a higher percentage of respondents than I had anticipated cover the periods in question (the Spanish Civil War, Franco dictatorship, transition to democracy) in their classrooms. Across the board, the Spanish Civil War is the period which receives the highest coverage, out of these. Comparatively, there is markedly higher coverage of the civil war and dictatorship in non-Catholic schools than in Catholic schools. All of the periods of history in question are much more likely to be covered in the baccalaureate history course than in the mandatory secondary education history course. Finally, out of the cities in question, Barcelona had the lowest percentage of coverage of these periods of history, as compared to Madrid and Sevilla. The most notable takeaway of this thesis, I argue, is that a number of Spanish history teachers have incorporated modern historical memory developments such as the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, the exhumations of Spanish Civil War era mass graves, and the exhumation of Franco’s remains, into their classrooms. This incorporation, thanks to the volition of individual teachers or occasionally due to students raising these current events themselves, represents a clear impact of the delayed transitional justice movement in Spain.

The highly polemicized 2020 US presidential election occurred within the logistically challenging contexts of the Covid-19 pandemic, prompting states to implement widely varying electoral reforms, including increased access to Vote-by-Mail (“VBM”) and adoption of All-Mail Voting (“AMV”). Despite polarized rhetoric around the increased use of mail ballots and varied degrees of VBM expansion, voter turnout universally increased across the US. Historic literature fails to explain the disparate effects of various electoral reforms on voter turnout; this paper thus seeks consensus through consideration of the 2020 election and contemporary literature. This paper begins with a synthesis of the current state of electoral reform legislation and theories on voter participation. It then synthesizes current and historic literature on the effects of various electoral reforms on voter turnout, turning ultimately to the effects of VBM and AMV on voter turnout in US elections. It then addresses historic use of VBM before analyzing the performance of VBM and AMV in the 2020 election. Lastly, it considers the effects of electoral reforms on demographic subgroups and contests commonly cited alternative explanations. Historic findings indicate that AMV increases voter turnout by 4%, while the 2020 election suggests rates closer to 6%. Increased access to VBM was found to have less significant, though nonetheless positive effects on voter turnout. Analysis of 2020 election data also demonstrates that partisan lean correlates with increased availability of VBM in the 2020 election, and that such availability, with the exception of states experiencing already high turnout rates, positively correlates with significant increases in voter turnout. Data from administration of the 2020 election in California also suggests that AMV spurs increased turnout among Black, Latino, Asian, and youth voters and accordingly decreases the turnout gap across demographic subgroups. Further research into the effects of AMV on the turnout of demographic subgroups is nonetheless required; additionally, further study on the intersectional effects of AMV and other electoral reforms is necessary to fully understand the mechanisms by which voter turnout changes.

The Census Bureau counts incarcerated Americans at the location of their prison cells, rather than their hometowns. Census data is a central part of redistricting, enabling state and local governments to create roughly equal constituencies. But because felons largely cannot vote, districts containing penitentiaries can be the same size as their neighbor but with a fraction of the voting population. This means that voters in that district have a disproportionately high amount of representation. Patterns of incarceration further mean that people in prison are primarily incarcerated out of urban, Democratic communities of color and held in prisons in rural, white, Republican areas. The result is a transfer of political power from urban hubs to rural areas, with consequences for policy. Thirteen states have taken some level of action to address prison gerrymandering and mitigate its effects. This thesis investigates the factors relating to legislative success, finding that Democratic trifecta governments, mobilizing narratives around racial equity, and a legal foundation based in notions of electoral equality and representational nexuses all correspond to the passage of comprehensive legislation.

The rapid creation of contact tracing apps at the beginning of COVID-19 is unprecedented given that 109 countries adopted these apps in the span of just a few months. Governments turned to contact tracing apps to speed up the process of manual contact tracing, piloting a system that had never been used before. This was often presented as a solution to the pandemic, but these apps came with the innate drawback of collecting sensitive personal information. This data collection gave governments an opportunity to use contact tracing apps as a way to expand surveillance of their populations. There are many concerns that this surveillance will persist after the end of the pandemic, which poses a significant risk to privacy and civil liberties at large. In this thesis, I seek to understand how the length of time that a country has had a data privacy law impacts the implementation of its contact tracing app. I find that the duration of a data privacy law has no impact on a country’s contact tracing app implementation. Instead, country-specific factors play a role. I look at the cases of Australia and South Korea, as they both have had a data privacy law for a long period of time but implemented their contact tracing apps in very different ways. I argue that Australia’s previous mishandling of digital projects and South Korea’s experience with the 2015 MERS outbreak alongside the government’s skillful deployment of technology shaped how the two countries designed their contact tracing apps.

In a decade and a half, three Presidential administrations in the Republic of Ecuador have led the country to oscillate three times in its selection of sovereign and private creditors. Beginning in 2007 with the election of President Rafael Correa, Ecuador foreclosed any possibility of borrowing from Western multilaterals and bond markets following a puzzling decision to default on bonds. Over the next ten years, Ecuador became one of the 30-most indebted countries to the People’s Republic of China. Then, when Correa’s successor President Lenín Moreno was elected in 2017, a process many described as a parricide marked a re-embrace of multilaterals, though the administration also continued to borrow heavily from China. Finally, in 2021, President Guillermo Lasso aligned himself, and therefore, the country, closer once more with multilaterals, and finally qualified Chinese lending to Ecuador as detrimental to the country’s growth. In this thesis, I seek to determine what a country’s guiding and principal motivations are when choosing with which creditor to engage. I examine each of these three Presidential administrations as distinct time periods in Ecuador’s history of sovereign borrowing, and seek to answer the aforementioned question through interviews with seven high-ranking officials in the Ecuadorian government or regional and international multilaterals. I also leverage qualitative analysis of public declarations, government decrees, and contracts. I find that, broadly, incentives to oscillate between creditors can be split into economic and political motivations. Each of these in turn can be subdivided further into considerations. These are availability of capital, cost of capital, ideological affinity, geopolitical considerations, and political and electoral benefits. I concluded that while these considerations vary in importance from one administration to the next, availability of capital and ideological affinity were central across all three administrations. I also highlight how creditor selection can be used to garner political and electoral benefits, particularly through the use of signaling mechanisms for voters. This is an element that escapes the literature and is a new contribution to the field.

Extremist and violent content on social media poses an existential threat to the fabric of our democracy. Social media has democratized information dissemination, enabling a single message to reach millions of individuals in an instant. Individualized news feeds contribute to growing polarization, delegitimizing verified sources of news, and threatening fundamental democratic processes. Yet not all social media platforms propagate such harmful information in the same way. Parler, a social media platform, differentiates itself from others due to its lack of content moderation. Drawing a base of right-wing users, Parler rose to national prominence throughout 2020, boasting nearly 20 million users by December 2020. Parler’s success reflected a dangerous and growing trend of unease with Trump’s loss. The platform was partially blamed for the insurrection on January 6th and was taken offline shortly after by Amazon Web Services, with Google and Apple removing it from app stores. Parler represents a unique case study of a harmful online community growing at a rapid pace. In addition, Parler’s deplatforming sparked a national debate concerning best practices to ameliorate the hate extremist groups spread while simultaneously protecting free speech. Investigating both the evolution of Parler and the effectiveness of its deplatforming allows for important insights into this radical community and the connection between social media and democracy at large. QAnon, a dangerous and hateful conspiracy theory, was able to grow exponentially on Parler. This content found a home on Parler and skyrocketed in popularity as more users flowed to the platform. Parler has provided a home for radical and hateful rhetoric, allowing for content banned on other platforms. As more and more users joined Parler, the content reflects rising hatred and violence. Studying Parler’s evolution makes it inextricably clear that it is inherently linked with Trump. Trump remains popular on the platform throughout its lifespan, heavily influencing the content and rhetoric. Deplatforming as a potential solution to limiting the power of radical communities is an intricate balance. While deplatforming succeeded in reducing the number of users and the volume of content on the platform, core users with a greater number of posts returned in higher numbers. While hosting services may have succeeded in reducing the general appeal of Parler, dedicated right-wing users were not dissuaded and returned to regularly post. Web hosting services hold tremendous power in the arena of controlling hate. In order to properly exercise this power, they must proceed with caution and a principled approach.

The United States spends roughly $3.8 trillion on healthcare each year, or 18% of GDP. Even while delivering less access to health insurance coverage and lower quality of care relative to other advanced economies, America cannot sustain current rates of health spending growth. The biggest line item in the US healthcare budget is inpatient and outpatient care, a large portion of which – and the only spending category that has not yet been thoroughly scrutinized – is payments to physicians for their services. The reasons behind exorbitant spending on doctors’ fees is surprisingly understudied given its fiscal impact. In this thesis, I argue that high US health spending is driven in part by the involvement of doctors, and interest groups representing them, in medical services pricing policy at the federal level. The United States’ political and healthcare systems are unique among its peer countries. This thesis leverages a comparison between the United States and Japan to contextualize the processes the US government uses to determine health prices and explain the reasons they evolved as they did. All prices for medical services in the US are tied, directly or indirectly, to the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, a list of services and accompanying prices maintained by the US government and shaped from its inception by medical interest groups. The key arena for these price-setting activities is a committee of doctors, the Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC), convened by America’s largest physician interest group, the American Medical Association (AMA). The RUC steers prices by making price change recommendations – almost always increases – to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) based on a review process fraught with bias and imprecise science. CMS has historically accepted 87.5% of these changes, making them the basis for how physician services are reimbursed nationally. This annual process is little known, yet it is a key driver of high health spending in the United States. Investigating the experience of Japan, a fellow advanced postindustrial democracy, yields insights into the relationship between government and doctors’ interest groups in a country that spends less than half as much as the US on healthcare per capital while enjoying high quality outcomes. Like the US, Japan uses both a fee schedule system and a committee comprised of private interests where doctors are heavily represented to assist in the pricing update process. However, Japan’s government retains control. From start to finish, a team of bureaucrats maintains decision authority and relies on both robust national surveys and the input of a government-convened committee of private interests across the health sector to decide on appropriate price changes for physician services. In the price updating process, Japan has three capabilities the United States lacks which I make recommendations for emulating in the American context: robust and reliable health services utilization and pricing information; transparency, with the public begetting accountability for pricing decisions; and a well-resourced and empowered bureaucracy firmly in charge. With physician services price setting, like in many other realms of American policymaking, self-serving interest group involvement and a disempowered bureaucracy are key challenges that must be overcome in order to fundamentally alter America’s current path toward an unsustainably large – and ever increasing – healthcare bill the country can no longer afford.

Oman saw 50 years of rapid economic development under the autocratic rule of Sultan Qaboos bin Said. The state’s simultaneous advancement and authoritarian resilience puzzled proponents of modernization theory. Even when the Arab Spring triggered waves of protests, the so-called benevolent dictator appeared unshakable. In this work, I identify challenges to authoritarianism and sources of state strength in Oman between 2000 and 2019. First, where did pressures for democratic reforms originate and how did they manifest? Analyzing recent protests, I find that educational cleavages are more relevant for understanding dissent today than the ethno-sectarian divides that historically mobilized critics of the regime. Second, how has state spending related to democratic pressures and authoritarian stability? Evaluating state responses to unrest, I conclude that the Sultanate has relied on oil rents to reward key protest groups. In response to new demands from educated citizens, the state has also made symbolic reforms and increasingly relied on repression. As higher education expands and oil rents falter, democratic demands may reemerge and force the state to either pursue democratization or forgo its benevolence.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) finds itself at a crossroads. Four of its member states have initiated withdrawal proceedings since 2015, and many of its preliminary and formal investigations seem to be at an impasse. This project asks an old question, “will more states withdraw from the ICC?” but seeks a new type of answer. Collected here is an exhaustive record of interactions between the ICC and its African and Asia-Pacific member states from 2015 to 2020, possibly the first of its kind. Also presented is a new system for evaluating and scoring ICC-member state interactions, called the ICC Cooperation Score (ICS), as well as a series of statistical tests identifying which characteristics of states are associated with greater support for, and cooperation with, the ICC. Though state interactions with the ICC are the products of a complex set of factors, identifying patterns in member state behavior is possible, and these patterns have important implications for the ICC’s future.

The refugee and asylum policies of developing world countries have long been overlooked in academic and policy circles. This represents a critical gap in the literature, as developing countries host 84% of the world’s refugees. Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, hosts 26% of the global refugee population. Some African countries welcome refugees and facilitate their safety and prosperity by offering them liberal freedoms. Others seek to prevent the entry of refugees or limit their freedom with draconian policies. How do African countries formulate asylum policies and how do they respond when borders are threatened or crossed by refugees? Uganda is an empirical outlier which can offer insight into this understudied area. Uganda hosts over 1 million refugees, which the country supports with policies that are perceived to be the most progressive in the world. The limited literature on the determinants of asylum policy in the developing world fail to explain Uganda’s policy response. This thesis argues that this failure stems from an inadequate engagement with the nature and political priorities of the host state’s governing regime. Host governments formulate asylum policies with a view towards both domestic and international political considerations. How much or how little governing regimes provide for refugees is influenced by the possibilities afforded by the state’s domestic political environment. For Museveni, progressive refugee governance fits into a broader foreign policy strategy of image management with the West, reinforcing his reputation as a guarantor of regional stability and deflecting scrutiny of his authoritarian domestic policies. Evaluating the relationship between regime type and asylum policy is one way to examine how policy outcomes vary across different domestic political environments. Analysis of this relationship reveals that autocrats comprise some 93% of asylum policy liberalizers in Sub-Saharan Africa since the Cold War. In particular, personalist autocrats – those autocrats who have “personalized” power and most closely resemble the stereotype of unconstrained dictatorial rule – account for 60% of liberalizers. This trend supports the idea that progressive refugee governance has strategic value for African autocrats, deflecting international scrutiny into repressive domestic policies, indicating a commitment to international norms, and highlighting a state’s stability relative to regional neighbors. This thesis posits that liberalization of national asylum policy came to serve as a signaling device of these desirable characteristics in the Cold War’s aftermath as liberalizing pressure was applied to African dictators.

Secure Communities is a national immigration enforcement program that allows U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to gain access to the fingerprints of all suspects booked at local jails. Upon receiving the fingerprints, ICE can request that the jail hold a suspect until they can be transferred into ICE’s custody. From 2009 to the present day, Secure Communities has led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and has garnered criticism for threatening to compromise the relationship between local law enforcement and the communities they serve. This thesis provides one of the first empirical examinations of the effects of the program on individuals’ trust in local law enforcement. I use millions of calls for service before and after the implementation of Secure Communities in Seattle, Washington as a proxy for residents’ trust in local law enforcement. Using this call for service data, I employ a difference-indifferences design to estimate the causal relationship between the implementation of the program and trust in local law enforcement. In particular, I examine whether we observe a decrease in calls for service in higher-density Hispanic areas compared to lower-density Hispanic areas postimplementation. Contrary to expectations, I find no significant effect of the programs’ implementation on rates of calls for service, in general, or on domestic violence calls, in particular. In light of these findings, I remark on the possibility that Seattle’s sanctuary policies may have provided a buffer against the potential negative consequences of Secure Community’s implementation on Hispanic residents’ trust in local law enforcement.