Examinations of international water treaties suggest that riparian states are not heeding the advice for Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM). Theories suggest that the larger the number of negotiating states, the lower the cost of the joint operation of treaties, but the transaction cost of negotiating and maintaining large-N treaties increases. We model the trade-off between benefits and costs associated with the number of treaty signatories and apply it to a global International-water treaty dataset. Findings confirm that the transaction cost of negotiation and the economies of scale of benefits are important in determining the paucity of basin-wide agreements, the treaty contents, and its extent.

Though sexism is often understood, by analogy with racism, as hostile prejudice toward women, I argue that gender prejudice includes a second face, so-called “benevolent” sexism. Analyzing unique nationally-representative survey data I demonstrate that both shaped presidential candidate evaluations and voting. Moving to the congressional level, I show that each face operates differently. In analyses of actual congressional candidates and in a conjoint experiment, I nd that hostile sexism is moderated by candidate sex: those high in hostile sexism oppose (and those low in hostile sexism favor) female candidates. Benevolent sexism, on the other hand, is moderated by a candidate’ gendered leadership style: those high in benevolent sexism oppose candidates with feminine styles and they favor candidates with masculine styles, regardless of whether the candidate is male or female. I conclude with consideration of a two-faced conception of sexism for our analysis of the political psychology of gender and power.

Laia Balcells (Georgetown University), José Fernández-Albertos (Spanish Higher Council of Scientific Research), Alexander Kuo (Oxford University)

Do self-determination movements and crisis over independence lead to social polarization? Who is likely to polarize in such instances? The recent political crisis over independence in Catalonia has made these questions more salient and provides an important testing ground to addresses these questions. We argue that policy-based polarization in the case of highly salient self-determination issues can spillover into social polarization, and we try to capture variation and persistence of such social polarization.

We fielded a two-wave survey in Catalonia embedding experiments that randomized evaluation of groups as well as consequences of policies related to independence of Catalonia from Spain. The first wave was fielded just before the politically salient 2017 regional elections, which took place a few weeks after a unilateral independence referendum, a declaration of independence by the Catalan parliament, and a subsequent suspension of regional autonomy by the Spanish government. We find strong evidence of policy-based polarization that spills over into social polarization, and that such polarization is partially driven by those with pro-independence stances, as well as with those with strong pro-state preferences.  However, we find limits to polarization in terms of the economic costs that even strong independence and status-quo supporters are willing to incur. The second wave was fielded in September 2018 to test the durability of this polarization.

Irfan is the Hamad Bin Khalifa al Thani Professor of Indian Politics and the Director of the Georgetown India Initiative, and a noted scholar of economic development, democratization, and civil conflict in the developing world. His books include Coalition Politics and Economic Development (2011) and Elections in Hard Times (2016, with T.E. Flores).

A rich literature has identified a number of important drivers of nuclear proliferation. Most of this work, however, treats the determinants of proliferation as constant over the entire nuclear age—the factors leading to proliferation are assumed to be the same in 2010 as they were in 1945. But there are reasons to suspect that the drivers of proliferation have changed over this time: nuclear technology is easier to come by, the global strategic environment has shifted, and the nuclear nonproliferation regime has come into being. To examine how the drivers of nuclear proliferation have changed over time, I adapt a cross-validation technique frequently used in the machine learning literature. I create a rolling window of training data with which statistical models of proliferation are built, and I then test the predictive power of these models against data from other time periods. The result of this analysis is a temporal map of how the determinants of proliferation have changed over time. My findings suggest that the underlying dynamics of nuclear proliferation have indeed changed over time, with important implications both for the literature on nuclear proliferation and for policymakers interested in limiting the future spread of nuclear weapons.

This paper examines the nature of China’s current research climate and its effects on foreign scholarship. Drawing on an original survey of over 500 China scholars, we find that repressive research experiences are a rare but real phenomenon, and collectively present a barrier to the conduct of research in China. Roughly 9% of China scholars report having been “taken for tea” by authorities within the past ten years; 26% of scholars who conduct archival research report being denied access; and 5% of researchers report some difficulty obtaining a visa. The paper provides descriptive information on the nature of these experiences and their determinants. It concludes with a discussion of self-censorship and strategies for conducting research on China.