Domestic approaches to compliance with international commitments often presume that international law has a distinct effect on the beliefs and preferences of national publics+ Studies attempting to estimate the consequences of international law unfortunately face a wide range of empirical and methodological challenges+ This article uses an experimental design embedded in two U+S+ national surveys to offer direct systematic evidence of international law's effect on mass atti-tudes+ To provide a relatively tough test for international law, the surveys examine public attitudes toward the use of torture, an issue in which national security concerns are often considered paramount+ Contrary to the common contention of international law's inefficacy, I find that legal commitments have a discernible impact on public support for the use of torture+ The effect of international law is also strongest in those contexts where pressures to resort to torture are at their highest+ However, the effects of different dimensions in the level of international agreements' legalization are far from uniform+ In contrast to the attention often devoted to binding rules, I find that the level of obligation seems to make little difference on public attitudes toward torture+ Rather, the relative precision of the rules, along with the degree to which enforcement is delegated to third parties, plays a much greater role in shaping public preferences+ Across both international law and legalization, an individual's political ideology also exerts a strong mediating effect, though in varying directions depending on the design of the agreement+ The findings have implications for understanding the overall impact of international law on domestic actors, the importance of institutional design, and the role of political ideology on compliance with international agreements+

We present a 50‐year historical perspective of the nation's antipoverty efforts, describing the evolution of policy during four key periods since 1965. Over this half‐century, the initial heavy reliance on cash income support to poor families has eroded; increases in public support came largely in the form of in‐kind (e.g., Food Stamps) and tax‐related (e.g., the Earned Income Tax Credit) benefits. Work support and the supplementation of earnings substituted for direct support. These shifts eroded the safety net for the most disadvantaged in American society. Three poverty‐related analytical developments are also described. The rise of the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM)—taking account of noncash and tax‐related benefits—has corrected some of the serious weaknesses of the official poverty measure (OPM). The SPM measure indicates that the poverty rate has declined over time, rather than being essentially flat as the OPM implies. We also present snapshots of the composition of the poor population in the United States using both the OPM and the SPM, showing progress in reducing poverty overall and among specific socioeconomic subgroups since the beginning of the War on Poverty. Finally, we document the expenditure levels of numerous antipoverty programs that have accompanied the several phases of poverty policy and describe the effect of these efforts on the level of poverty. Although the effectiveness of government antipoverty transfers is debated, our findings indicate that the growth of antipoverty policies has reduced the overall level of poverty, with substantial reductions among the elderly, disabled, and blacks. However, the poverty rates for children, especially those living in single‐parent families, and families headed by a low‐skill, low‐education person, have increased. Rates of deep poverty (families living with less than one‐half of the poverty line) for the nonelderly population have not decreased, reflecting both the increasing labor market difficulties faced by the low‐skill population and the tilt of means‐tested benefits away from the poorest of the poor.

Audience costs theory posits that domestic publics punish leaders for making an external threat and then backing down.One key mechanism driving this punishment involves the value the public places on consistency between their leaders' statements and actions. If true, this mechanism should operate not only when leaders fail to implement threats, but also when they fail to honor promises to stay out of a conflict. We use a survey experiment to examine domestic responses to the president's decision to "back down" from public threats and "back into" foreign conflicts. We find the president loses support in both cases, but suffers more for "backing out" than "backing in." These differential consequences are partially explained by asymmetries in the public's treatment of new information. Our findings strongly suggest that concerns over consistency undergird audience costs theory and that punishment for inconsistency will be incurred, regardless of the leader's initial policy course.

Under what conditions are individuals more likely to approve of human rights abuses by their governments? While various theoretical expectations have been offered about public approval of repression, many of them have not been directly tested. We analyze the effects of differing opposition tactics, differing government tactics, and legal constraints on approval of repression through a series of survey experiments in India, Israel, and Argentina. Our results indicate that violent action by opposition groups consistently increases support for government repression. In the context of contentious politics, we find that the effects of international law vary by national context. While our respondents in India were less likely to approve of their government when told the government violated international law, the same information likely increased approval of the government in our Israel experiment. The findings provide insights into the microfoundations of existing theories and suggest areas for theory refinement.

Past studies have applied insights from the democratic peace to show that democracies are also less likely to sanction one another compared to other regime types. More recent work challenges this finding by arguing that the economic peace between democracies largely disappears once methodological improvements are included along with the particular behavior of the United States as market hegemon. This article cautions that these critiques may themselves be an artifact of particularities in past data on economic sanctions. Using a larger and more representative sanctions dataset, the analysis shows that democracies do seem less likely on average to sanction each other. Furthermore, the United States does not appear to be unique in its sanctioning behavior compared to other democracies. However, the article proposes a middle ground between proponents and skeptics of an economic peace between democracies. The analysis shows that the pacifying effects of joint democracy only operate for security related sanctions, while in non-security related matters democratic constraints are less evident. The results point to the importance of considering more closely the choice of data on sanctions, but also the need to take into account the issues under contention for episodes of economic coercion.