PUBLICATIONS

Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives. 2004. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2006 Paperback version.

This detailed account of ethnic minority politics explains when and how European institutions successfully used norms and incentives to shape domestic policy toward ethnic minorities and why those measures sometimes failed.

Going beyond traditional analyses, Kelley examines the pivotal engagement by the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Council for Europe in the creation of such policies.

Following language, education, and citizenship issues during the 1990s in Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania, she shows how the combination of membership conditionality and norm-based diplomacy was surprisingly effective at overcoming even significant domestic opposition. However, she also finds that diplomacy alone, without the offer of membership, was ineffective unless domestic opposition to the proposed policies was quite limited.

"D-Minus Elections: The Politics and Norms of International Election Observation." (forthcoming in International Organization)

Abstract: As international election monitors have grown active worldwide, their announcements have gained influence. Sometimes, however, they endorse highly flawed elections. Because their leverage rests largely on their credibility, this is puzzling. Understanding the behavior of election monitors is important because their assessments help the international community to assess the legitimacy of governments and because their assessments often inform the data used by scholars to study democracy. International election monitoring is also interesting because it is one of a few fields shared by both intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations and because the core mandate of election monitors essentially is to police norms. This study uses a new dataset of 591 international election monitoring missions from a mix of organizations to examine the role of organizational interests and norms in explaining monitors’ assessments of elections. It finds that monitors do consider the elections’ quality, but they also consider the interests of their member states or donors as well as other compelling organizational norms. Thus, even when accounting for the nature and level of irregularities in an election, monitors’ concerns about democracy promotion, violent instability, and organizational politics and preferences are associated with election endorsement. The study also reveals differences in the behavior of various intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations and explains why neither can pursue their core objectives single-mindedly.

“The Concept of International Delegation.” 2008. Law and Contemporary Problems, 71(1): 1-36. With Curtis Bradley.

Most nations today participate in a dense network of international cooperation that requires them to grant authority to international actors. At varying levels this means that the individual state surrenders some autonomy to international bodies or other states by authorizing them to participate in decisionmaking processes and to take actions that affect the state. While some international agreements involve only commitments, in many cases they also include provisions that delegate some authority to a body to make decisions and take actions. The continued growth in international organizations and various standing bodies associated with international agreements suggests that states increasingly find international delegation useful in addressing the challenges associated with their growing interdependence.

"The More the Merrier?^*The Effects of Having Multiple International Election Monitoring Organizations.” 2008. Perspectives on Politics, forthcoming.

As the pressure to invite international election monitors rose at the end of the Cold War, states refused to grant the United Nations a dominant role. Thus, today multiple intergovernmental, regional and international non-governmental organizations often monitor the same elections with equal authority. This article examines the costs and benefits of this complex regime to highlight some possible broader implications of regime complexity. It argues that the availability of many different organizations facilitates action that might otherwise have been blocked for political reasons. Furthermore, when different international election monitoring agencies agree, their consensus can bolster their individual legitimacy as well as the legitimacy of the international norms they stress, and thus magnify their influence on domestic politics. Unfortunately the election monitoring example also suggests that complex regimes can engender damaging inter-organizational politics and that the different biases, capabilities, and standards of organizations sometime can lead organizations to outright contradict each other or work at cross purposes.

"Assessing the complex evolution of norms: the rise of international election monitoring.” 2008. International Organization, 62(2): 221-55.

Given that states have long considered elections a purely domestic matter, the dramatic growth of international election monitoring in the 1990s was remarkable. Why did states allow international organizations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to interfere and why did international election monitoring spread so quickly? Why did election monitoring become institutionalized in so many organizations? Perhaps most puzzling, why do countries invite monitors and nevertheless cheat? This article develops a rigorous method for investigating the causal mechanisms underlying the rise of election monitoring, and “norm cascades” more generally. The evolution and spread of norms, as with many other social processes, are complex combinations of normative, instrumental, and other constraints and causes of action. The rise of election monitoring has been driven by an interaction of instrumentalism, emergent norms, and fundamental power shifts in the international system. By dissecting this larger theoretical complexity into specific subclaims that can be empirically investigated, this article examines the role of each of these causal factors, their mutual tensions, and their interactive contributions to the evolution of election monitoring.

"Who Keeps International Commitments and Why? The International Criminal Court and Bilateral Non-Surrender Agreements." 2007. American Political Science Review, 101(3): 573-589.

What do countries do when they have committed to a treaty, but then find that commitment challenged? After the creation of the International Criminal Court, the United States tried to get countries, regardless of whether they were parties to the Court or not, to sign agreements not to surrender Americans to the Court. Why did some states sign and others not? Given United States power and threats of military sanctions, some states did sign. However, such factors tell only part of the story. When refusing to sign, many states emphasized the moral value of the court. Further, states with a high domestic rule of law emphasized the importance of keeping their commitment. This article therefore advances two classic arguments that typically are difficult to substantiate; namely, state preferences are indeed partly normative, and international commitments do not just screen states; they also constrain.

"New Wine in Old Wineskins: Policy Learning and Adaptation in The new European Neighborhood policy.” Journal of Common Market Studies Vol. 44(1), 2006, 29-55.

The EU’s newly launched European neighbourhood policy (ENP) is a fascinating case study in organizational management theory of how the Commission strategically adapted enlargement policies to expand its foreign policy domain. From the use of action plans, regular reports and negotiations to the larger conceptualization and use of socialization and conditionality, the development of the policy shows significant mechanical borrowing from the enlargement strategies. Given the lack of the membership carrot, the question is whether such adaptation from enlargement can promote political reforms in the ENP countries, which are generally poor, often autocratic and, in some cases, embroiled in domestic conflicts. This article traces the development of the policy and assesses prospects for human rights and democracy reforms.

“Strategic non-cooperation as soft balancing: Why Iraq was not just about Iraq." International Politics Vol. 42(2), 2005, 153-173.

Many commentators explain recent transatlantic rifts by pointing to diverging norms, interests and geopolitical preferences. This paper proceeds from the premise that not all situations of conflict are necessarily due to underlying deadlocked preferences. Rather, non-cooperation may be a strategic form of soft balancing. That is, more generally, if they believe that they are being shortchanged in terms of influence and payoffs, weaker states may deliberately reject possible cooperation in the short run to improve their influence vis-a-vis stronger states in the long run. This need not be due to traditional relative gains concern. States merely calculate that their reputation as a weak negotiator will erode future bargaining power and subsequently their future share of absolute gains. Strategic non-cooperation is therefore a rational signal of resolve. This paper develops the concept of strategic non-cooperation as a soft balancing tool and applies it to the Iraq case in 2002–2003.

"International Actors on the Domestic Scene: Membership Conditionality and Socialization by International Institutions.” International Organization, Vol. 58(3), 2004, 459-459.

International relations scholars increasingly debate when and how international institutions influence domestic policy. This examination of ethnic politics in four Baltic and East European countries during the 1990s shows how European institutions shaped domestic policy, and why these institutions sometimes failed. Comparing traditional rational choice mechanisms such as membership conditionality with more socialization-based efforts, I argue that conditionality motivated most behavior changes, but that socialization-based efforts often guided them. Furthermore, using new case studies, statistics, and counterfactual analysis, I find that domestic opposition posed far greater obstacles to socialization-based methods than it did to conditionality : when used alone, socialization-based methods rarely changed behavior; when they did, the domestic opposition was usually low and the effect was only moderate. In contrast, incentive-based methods such as membership conditionality were crucial in changing policy: As domestic opposition grew, membership conditionality was not only increasingly necessary to change behavior, but it was also surprisingly effective.

"Does Domestic Politics Limit the Influence of External Actors on Domestic Politics?” Human Rights Review, Vol. 4(3), April-June 2003, 34-54.

The considerable improvements in ethnic minority legislation in East and Central Europe during the 1990s underscore two important points: that ethnic policy analysis need to include international dimensions beyond the homeland, and that such outside actors can overcome considerable levels of domestic opposition. Indeed, European organizations were active and participants in the formulation of ethnic policy in countries such as Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia and Romania. This paper explores the extent to which domestic political opposition limited the effectiveness of external efforts to use soft persuasion and monitoring as well as harder political conditionality. I find that domestic politics is not an insurmountable obstacle: when confronted with concerted international efforts, and especially with promises of organizational membership, national policymakers often choose to compromise, leaving the more extreme opposition marginalized.

* This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0550111. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.