Political Science Professor A. Burcu Bayram Featured in Political Research Quarterly

Professor Burcu Bayram was published in the June edition of Sage Publishing’s Political Research Quarterly.

Bayram received her Ph.D. in political science from The Ohio State University with specializations in international relations, political psychology and survey research.

She has research interests in international organization and law, public opinion and foreign policy, and survey and experimental methodology, and her research applies insights from political psychology and behavioral economics to the study of global cooperation.

Bayram applies these research interests in her article titled “Influencing Enforcement: The Application of International Law in Independent Judiciaries—The Case of the Alien Tort Statute.” 

ABSTRACT

What explains the variation in the interpretation and enforcement of international law by domestic judges? Can independent judiciaries control the enforcement of countries’ commitments to international law? In this paper, we leverage a unique source of data—cases related to the Alien Tort Statute—to investigate how independent judges might be able to enforce international commitments to human rights without concern for whether the state (here the United States) has opted into the commitments in the first place. We show that behavioral factors in judicial decision making, and particularly those related to judicial ideological preferences, are potent predictors of judicial enforcement of international law. This implies that states with highly independent judiciaries are right to be worried about their abilities to control enforcement domestically, although we also find evidence that the U.S. government gets a special degree of deference in these cases.

Bayram’s full article is available for free through Sage Publishing.

This story also appeared in the University of Arkansas News publication.