The International Court of Justice and the World's Three Legal Systems

Powell, Emilia Justyna; Mitchell, Sara McLaughlin

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00539.x

Cited by 71 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(59 reference statements)

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“…We should again point out that a willingness to employ legalized third party forms of conflict management could make bilateral settlement more likely and more successful. For example, democratic states are significantly more likely to recognize the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice than nondemocratic states, which may create more efficient out of court bargaining for democratic dyads (Powell and Mitchell 2007). Looking only at the frequency of actual binding third party efforts may be misleading if democracies are strategic actors that anticipate the possibility of these binding judgments, and hence prefer to negotiate more efficiently on their own.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Democracies Keep the Peace: Contextual Factors that Influence Conflict Management Strategies

Ellis

Mitchell

Prins³

2010

Foreign Policy Analysis

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Some studies find that democratic states are more amenable to third party forms of conflict management, while other studies indicate that democracies are able to resolve contentious issues on their own through bilateral negotiations. Using data from the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project, the authors investigate peaceful and militarized conflict management strategies that democratic states employ to resolve contentious issues. Theoretically, the authors focus on how militarized conflict history, relative capabilities, and issue salience influence the tools of conflict management that democratic states employ. Empirical analyses suggest that democratic dyads employ bilateral negotiations more often to resolve contentious issues when the issue has been militarized previously, when the issue is more salient, and when they are facing an equal adversary. Democratic dyads seek out non-binding third party settlement more frequently in situations of power preponderance than non-democratic dyads, although binding forms of third party settlement occur most often in relatively equal democratic dyads. Pairs of democracies are more likely to employ militarized conflict management strategies when they have resorted to force over the issue previously, when the issue is highly salient, and when they are evenly matched. This paper was prepared for the American Political Science Association Conference, Boston, MA, August [28][29][30][31] 2008. We thank Paul Hensel and John Vasquez for comments on a previous version of the paper.Over the last decade, the phenomenon known as the democratic peace has received a considerable amount of attention in the International Relations literature. The main tenet of this theory is well known: democracies seldom, if ever, go to war with each other (e.g. Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman 1992;Maoz and Russett 1993), although democratic states may be equally likely to participate in wars as nondemocracies (Chan 1997;Ray 1995Ray , 2000. 1 These empirical observations, supported in a wide variety of studies, have spurred a rather rich quest to ascertain why the dyadic democratic peace exists. A number of possibilities have been posited, including shared norms of compromise and cooperation (Dixon 1993(Dixon , 1994Maoz and Russett 1993;Mitchell 2002) 1 Some studies present empirical evidence for a monadic democratic peace as well. See for example Benoit (1996), Huth and Allee (2002), Keller (2005), Leeds and Davis (1999), and Rummel (1983). 2 Ironically, while good at preventing escalation, democracies do not do such a good job of terminating lower-level disputes among themselves (Mitchell and Prins 1999). Senese (1997) finds that once in a militarized dispute, jointly democratic dyads are just as likely to escalate the dispute to uses of force short of war. 2We know that democracies are more likely to adopt compromise solutions to problems as a matter of course (Maoz and Russett 1993). But do these compromise solutions come about because of efficient bilateral contracting, because democracie...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Democracies Keep the Peace: Contextual Factors that Influence Conflict Management Strategies

Ellis

Mitchell

Prins³

2010

Foreign Policy Analysis

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“…The measure of common law legal systems comes from Powell and Mitchell (2007). This is a binary variable coded 1 if a country's legal system has primarily features of a common law system.…”

Section: Appendices a Data Descriptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Evaluation of Explanations for State Repression

Hill¹,

2014

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T he empirical literature that examines cross-national patterns of state repression seeks to discover a set of political, economic, and social conditions that are consistently associated with government violations of human rights. Null hypothesis significance testing is the most common way of examining the relationship between repression and concepts of interest, but we argue that it is inadequate for this goal, and has produced potentially misleading results. To remedy this deficiency in the literature we use cross-validation and random forests to determine the predictive power of measures of concepts the literature identifies as important causes of repression. We find that few of these measures are able to substantially improve the predictive power of statistical models of repression. Further, the most studied concept in the literature, democratic political institutions, predicts certain kinds of repression much more accurately than others. We argue that this is due to conceptual and operational overlap between democracy and certain kinds of state repression. Finally, we argue that the impressive performance of certain features of domestic legal systems, as well as some economic and demographic factors, justifies a stronger focus on these concepts in future studies of repression.

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“…Overall, 10% of countries globally have mixed legal traditions. 4 Our legal system typology comes from Powell & Mitchell (2007). We describe these data in more detail in the research design section.…”

Section: Legal Traditions and Human Rights Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domestic legal traditions and states’ human rights practices

Mitchell

Ring

Spellman³

2013

Journal of Peace Research

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Empirical analyses of domestic legal traditions in the social science literature demonstrate that common law states have better economic freedoms, stronger investor protection, more developed capital markets, and better property rights protection than states with civil law, Islamic law, or mixed legal traditions. This article expands upon the literature by examining the relationship between domestic legal traditions and human rights practices. The primary hypothesis is that common law states have better human rights practices on average than civil law, Islamic law, or mixed law states because the procedural features of common law such as the adversarial trial system, the reliance on oral argumentation, and stare decisis result in greater judicial independence and protection of individual rights in these legal systems. We also examine how the quality of a state's legal system influences repression focusing on colonial legacy, judicial independence, and the rule of law. A global cross-national analysis of state-years from 1976 to 2006 shows that states with common law traditions engage in better human rights practices than states with other legal systems. This result holds when controlling for the quality of the legal system and standard explanations for states' human rights practices (economic growth, regime type, population size, military regime, and war involvement).

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The International Court of Justice and the World's Three Legal Systems

Cited by 71 publications

References 38 publications

How Democracies Keep the Peace: Contextual Factors that Influence Conflict Management Strategies

How Democracies Keep the Peace: Contextual Factors that Influence Conflict Management Strategies

An Empirical Evaluation of Explanations for State Repression

Domestic legal traditions and states’ human rights practices

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