Publications
Cinar, Ipek, and Robert Gulotty. “Negotiating exclusion: Regulatory barriers in preferential trade agreements.” Economics & Politics, 2021.
Trade negotiations now center on regulations. This paper argues that these negotiations can raise uncertainty over fixed costs. We develop a simple model of exporter competition to show how uncertainty generated by negotiations redistributes profits across firms. We show that regulatory uncertainty reduces competition by deterring entry on the part of less productive firms and shifting market share toward top producers. Empirically, we show that this negotiation-driven uncertainty can help explain the economically concentrating effects of preferential agreements. Preferential trade agreements combine tariff concessions with regulatory changes that ensure the benefits of the agreement are limited to member states. Using novel data covering firm-level export activity and public investment decisions in the automotive and automotive parts sectors during NAFTA, we find that negotiation-driven uncertainty deterred non-North American producers while benefiting the top American auto manufacturers. Paper (Wiley Online Library) |
Please click to the image displayed above to reach the interactive GIS-coded data visualization of this
project that maps transitional justice events across the globe. |
Cinar, Ipek, Susan Stokes, and Andres Uribe. "Presidential Rhetoric and Populism". Presidential Studies Quarterly 50(2): 240-263, 2020.
Scholars and the general public have been struck by the norm-shattering rhetoric of President Donald J. Trump. His "rhetorical signature" is heavy with Manichean good-versus-evil messages, vilification of his opponents, and disdain for institutions and for evidence. But many politicians vilify their opponents and style themselves as uniquely able to solve their society's problems. In fact, Trump's Manichean discourse is typical of populist leaders, in the United States and around the world. Using text-as-data analysis of campaign rhetoric, we study the content and mood of presidential campaign speeches by a range of U.S. politicians, which allows a broader perspective not only on the uniqueness of Trump's rhetoric, but also its continuities with the rhetoric of others. This analysis allows us to define Trump as a right-wing populist. Right-wing populists, like left-leaning ones, are anti-elitist and Manichean in words and outlook. However, the two versions of populism differ in the nature of the anti-elitism, with right-wing populists targeting political elites and left-wing ones targeting economic elites. Right-wing populists also define the "other" as ethnic out-groups, who threaten the ethnically pure "people.” Paper (Wiley Online Library) Bates, Genevieve, Ipek Cinar and Monika Nalepa. "Accountability by Numbers: A New Global Transitional Justice Dataset (1946-2016)". Perspectives on Politics , 18(1):161-184, 2020. In an era when democratic backsliding is common, scholars and policymakers have wondered if failure to reckon with former authoritarian elites and their collaborators had a role to play. Yet without adequate data on the way former autocracies and countries emerging from conflict deal with those responsible for human rights violations, it is hard to tell if new democracies are unstable because of their failure to reckon with their former authoritarian elites and their collaborators or despite it. This article introduces a new dataset of personnel transitional justice events that will allow scholars to answer such questions, disaggregating these events temporally from the date of a country’s democratization until 2016. The time series nature of our data allows scholars to measure key characteristics of states’ dealing with their past and complements existing datasets on events related to transitional justice by focusing not only on post-conflict societies (as the PCJ) and not only on post-authoritarian societies (as the TJDB), but on both. To showcase the possibilities our data affords scholars, we use it to develop three novel measures of personnel transitional justice: severity, urgency, and polarization. The granular structure of our data allows researchers to construct additional measures depending on their theoretical questions of interest. We compare and contrast our measures of transitional justice with the ones proposed by the authors of PCJ and TJDB and illustrate their use in a regression that also employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project. Paper (FirstView) Appendix Replication |