research

Ye, Min, and Jennifer Luse. 2010. “A Spatial Model of Voting Fluidity in the U.S. Supreme Court.” Journal of Political Science 38: 75 – 114. [Technical Supplements]

Voting fluidity is a common occurrence with its own dynamics during the judicial decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court. Our paper is one attempt to approach this issue with a formal model. Supreme Court justices are assumed to be rational decision makers pursuing a Court decision that is as close as possible to their ideal points on the ideological continuum. The process of opinion circulation is construed as an n-person bargaining game over the formation of majority opinion coalition. Justices interact with each other over the specific contents of the majority opinion until an equilibrium majority opinion coalition is made. A spatial analysis of all these equilibrium coalitions generates not only insights into the causes and features of voting fluidity, but also testable hypotheses. Using the voting data of the Burger Court, the empirical test demonstrates that the spatial model provides a consistent account of voting fluidity on the Court.

Horowitz, Shale, and Min Ye. 2013. “Targeting Civilians in Ethno-Territorial Wars: Power- and Preference-Based Sources of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Killing Strategies.” Studies of Conflict and Terrorism 36(5): 372–93. [online appendix]

In internal ethno-territorial conflicts, what explains why state or rebel group leaderships use civilian-targeting strategies—expulsion or mass killing strategies designed to punish enemy civilians or to decimate the enemy civilian presence on contested territory? One argument is that those living under the worst initial conditions—defined in terms of collective goods such as weak collective autonomy, policy outcomes, and material conditions—are most likely to target enemy group civilians. Another approach focuses on relative power—arguing that the enemy civilian population is targeted either because of weaker or stronger relative power. A third approach argues that differences in leadership preferences—in particular, more ideologically extreme or power-seeking preferences—are likely to drive direct assaults on enemy civilians. We examine these proposed mechanisms in terms of expected effects on benefits and costs in a simple ethno-territorial bargaining framework. We argue that relative power advantages and more extreme nationalist preferences seem most likely to predict decisions to target enemy civilian populations. We expect strongly power-seeking preferences to lead to civilian targeting more conditionally—where there is a greater internal political threat along with either greater relative power or a more moderate enemy. Last, we do not expect that variation in initial conditions will have a significant direct effect. We apply the framework to explain patterns of civilian targeting following the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991.

Ye, Min. 2015. "Understanding the Economics-Politics Nexus in South Korea-China Relations." Journal of Asian and African Studies 51(1): 97 – 118.[Replication Data]

A very interesting observation in recent South Korea-China relations is the sharp contrast between their "hot" economic and "cold" political ties. This article proposes to understand the "trade-conflict" relations from the perspective of two states' grand strategy of foreign policy. At the bilateral level, Vector Autoregression (VAR) models are employed to test the Granger causality between Sino-South Korean bilateral trade and political relations. At the regional level, the two states' economic and political ties with other regional powers in Northeast Asia are examined. The findings reveal different patterns in South Korea and China's grand strategies to balance their economic and political goals.

Ye, Min, Uk Heo, and Quan Li. 2018. "Economic Development and South Korea's UN PKO Participation." Journal of Asian and African Studies 53(5): 666 – 684.[Replication Data]

In this paper, we develop a theory on how economic development in South Korea has reshaped its foreign policy and examine the rising middle power's personnel contributions to the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (PKOs) using a supply-side rational choice model. Our results not only reaffirm economic development as the fundamental driving force of South Korea's growing contributions to UN PKOs, we also discover a handful of factors that influence South Korea's decision on UN PKO participation. This study highlights an important approach to bridge our knowledge of the global peacekeeping endeavors and individual countries' self-interested calculation.

Ye, Min, and Quan Li. 2020. "Proof of Greatness or Evidence of Modesty?—A Comparative Analysis of China's Participation in UN Peacekeeping Operations." Chinese Journal of Internatioanl Politics 13(1): 135 - 162. [Replication Data]

Any serious discussion about the consequences of China's rise must start with a systematic and rigorous assessment of China's actual influences and status in the international system. In this paper, we examine a widely used indicator in the debate about China's international status. While many existing studies see China's active participation in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (PKOs) as incontestable evidence of China's great power status, others contend that it indicates only the status of a middle power. We posit that China's policy behavior should be evaluated in a comparative manner and from a dynamic perspective. After comparing the patterns and features of China's personnel contributions with that of other 20 major countries in the world, we find that China's behaviors are more similar to those developing "middle powers" such as Turkey, India, and Brazil as opposed to established "great powers" such as other permanent members of the UN Security Council or traditional "western middle powers".

Ye, Min, and Quan Li. 2022. " Examining UN PKO Contributions at Multiple Levels ." Journal of Conflict Resolution forthcoming [Replication Data]

Most empirical studies on states’ personnel contributions to UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) use a state’s annual contributions as the unit of analysis. A critical problem of the state-level analysis is that it ignores the fact that states have to decide how to distribute these peacekeepers among more than a dozen peacekeeping missions. Ignoring the mission-level decision misses a significant part of states’ UN PKO contributions and could bias our empirical analysis. We propose a two-level model that sees a state’s UN PKO contributions as the interactions between the state-level and mission-level factors. This model is employed to revisit the heatedly debated “reimbursement hypothesis”. Our analysis of the empirical data between 1990 and 2018 shows a mixed relationship between states’ economic development and their UN PKO contributions. We also find that middle-income rather than low-income countries are the most critical providers of UN PKOs since the end of the cold war.