What states want: Estimating ideal points from international investment treaty content

Abstract

When negotiating investment treaties, states balance two goals: providing strong protections for investors (investor protection), which is thought to attract foreign direct investment, and maintaining the ability to regulate their economies (regulatory autonomy). In this article we argue that treaty content can tell us about the latent preferences that states have over the level of investor protection enshrined in BITs. We use an item response theory (IRT) model and a dataset of 1,144 treaties to estimate latent preferences on this scale for signatory countries. Our measure is of use to scholars interested in studying bilateral investment treaties, international law, and foreign direct investment, and our model is of use to anyone aiming to estimate latent preferences from jointly produced manifestations.

Estimating one-sided-killings from a robust measurement model of human rights

“…The measurement model and validation tests presented in this article contribute to a growing research area on using measurement models like this to improve the validity of the variables used to study peace and conflict (e.g. Anders, 2020;Barnum & Lo, 2020;Clay et al, 2020;Cordell et al, 2020;Huddleston, 2020;Krüger & Nordås, 2020;Marquardt, 2020;Meserve & Pemstein, 2020;Montal, Potz-Nielsen & Sumner, 2020;Terechshenko, 2020). Our research makes important improvements in the measurement and understanding of repressive events by linking together count data and categorical variables of repression.…”

Innovations in concepts and measurement for the study of peace and conflict

“…Both of these articles use text-as-data models that are widely applicable to other under-measured historical and contemporary institutional contexts. We also learn about new descriptive patterns of censorship (Meserve & Pemstein, 2020), territorial control (Anders, 2020), and repression and one-sided killings (Fariss, Kenwick & Reuning, 2020) using monadic data, and interstate hostility (Terechshenko, 2020), investor protection (Montal, Potz-Nielsen & Sumner, 2020), and international sovereignty of self-determination movements (Huddleston, 2020), using dyadic data. All of these articles offer novel innovations to standard measurement models in addition to generating new estimates of important substantive concepts.…”

“…Third, we have a large set of articles that generate latent measurements from monadic features, including data on rebel tactics (Anders, 2020), wartime sexual violence from human rights reports (Krü ger & Nordås, 2020), repressive events and human rights data (Fariss, Kenwick & Reuning, 2020b), and internet censorship takedown requests (Meserve & Pemstein, 2020). Our fourth and last set of articles focus on using dyadic data measures between parties, including event data on interstate hostility (Terechshenko, 2020), features of bilateral investment treaties (Montal, Potz-Nielsen & Sumner, 2020), and data on third-party recognition of self-determination movements (Huddleston, 2020).…”

“…Furthermore, in some cases it may be possible to construct monadic estimates of latent traits using dyadic data. Both of these characteristics appear in the article by Montal, Potz-Nielsen & Sumner (2020), who measure state investment preferences on an investor protection dimension by scaling dyadic characteristics of bilateral investment treaties that different states sign with each other. To help assess the concurrent validity of their estimates, they closely examine a particular case of interest -the finding that the United States has one of the lowest levels of investor protection for foreign investors of all the countries they examine.…”

Measurement That Matches Theory: Theory-Driven Identification in IRT Models

“…They are frequently used for legislative or judicial ideal point estimation (Poole and Rosenthal, 1985;Martin and Quinn, 2002;Bailey and Voeten, 2018). But they're also employed to derive a variety of measures relating to regime traits (Marquardt et al, 2019) or state capacity (Hanson and Sigman, 2021), qualities of human rights (Schnakenberg and Fariss, 2014;Hill Jr, 2016) or wartime sexual violence (Krüger and Nordås, 2020), interstate hostility (Terechshenko, 2020), states' preferences over investor protection (Montal et al, 2020), peace frameworks (Williams et al, 2019), leaders' willingness to use force (Carter and Smith, 2020), state trade legislation (Lee and Osgood, 2019), international norms (Girard, 2021), media freedom (Solis and Waggoner, 2020) and women's inclusion, rights, and security (Karim and Hill Jr., 2018).…”