Peer-reviewed Publications

Climate Change? Designing and Implementing Climate Surveys to Promote Inclusivity in Political Science Departments

PS: Political Science & Politics

Questions of racial, gendered and class-based inequality in political science are more salient than ever.  This article argues that climate surveys can be a useful tool for developing effective equity and inclusion strategies within academic departments. We provide advice on political, procedural, and messaging issues to consider when undertaking a departmental climate survey. In this paper we draw on our experience fielding a climate survey in the department of Political Science at The Ohio State University in 2018. This paper is coauthored with Sara Watson and Leyla Tosun. You can access a draft of the paper here, and the supplementary materials here. The survey instrument we designed is available in Qualtrics format here, or in PDF format here.

Speaking volumes: Introducing the UNGA speech Corpus

International Studies Quarterly

Many theoretical conclusions core to the study of international politics rely on having access to, and understanding, the rhetoric of international actors. One important development in advancing the empirical study of IR theory, therefore, is the availability of machine-analyzable speech data. A collection of fine-grained textual representation of states’ speeches in the context of an important international organization, such as the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), is needed to understand the ideas, preferences, and values that states put forth in their statements. An especially promising use for such a corpus of texts would be to measure states’ preferences based on their statements. In an effort to add to the burgeoning field of text-as-data in IR, I present the UNGA Speech Corpus, a collection of over 34,000 speeches delivered by states in the UNGA from 1993 to 2018. I use it to improve on recent work that links text to preferences in IR by combining a structural topic model with locally-trained word embeddings to estimate the policy positions of states on specific topics. I then show how these ‘topic scores’ can help scholars to improve their analyses of exigent international issues, such as global climate change governance. The paper is available here. Data are available for download here.

Working Papers

Moral arguments, Nuclear Reactions

Is there evidence of a normative prohibition against nuclear weapons, or a ‘nuclear taboo?’ Recent studies have found that a nuclear taboo, conceptualized as the opposite of amoral strategic consequentialism, does not exist within the American public. This article posits a new theory of international morality wherein consequentialism and categorical rules are two sides of one moral coin. I use this theoretical lens to analyze the moral values that states use to justify their policy positions vis-a-vis nuclear weapons, leveraging a new dataset of speeches delivered in the United Nations General Assembly. I find strong evidence of the nuclear taboo. In addition, states use consequentialist as well as categorical moral arguments to argue in favor of (and against) a prohibition on nuclear weapons. The cross-national aspect of the study finds that while most established nuclear weapons states have internalized the nuclear taboo, Israel and North Korea are notable exceptions. A draft of the paper is available upon request.

A recognitive theory of international moral agency

Previous research has recognized the importance of constructing a robust theory of moral agency in international politics. Scholars have increasingly turned their focus to evaluating whether non-state entities, such as weapons with artificial intelligence (AI) operating systems, meet the criteria for moral agency. This paper argues that existing scholarship has been too focused on defining essential attributes of moral agency, and reconceptualizes it as a function of relational and performative social processes. I argue that discourse, specifically moral statements, can be understood as speech acts that are generative of moral agency. In this framework, pronouncements like ‘the lethal autonomous weapons system has blood on its hands’ are performative and transactional. Moreover, a discursive, as opposed to essentialist, understanding of moral agency allows for the existence of variation in moral agency and thus presents a more expansive universe of international moral agents, wherein the recognition of actors’ moral standing is communicated by discursive engagement with moral ideas. The paper evaluates the proposed framework by evaluating the moral status and rights of lethal autonomous weapons systems as moral agents, and considers the theoretical and normative implications of doing so. A draft of the paper is available upon request.