About

Hello and welcome! I am a recent Ph.D. graduate in Political Science from Monash University, Australia, where I was advised by Robert Thomson and Michael Mintrom. My research focuses on questions of international cooperation in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), particularly on how member states make collective decisions. More broadly, I am interested in comparative and international political economy, as well as public policy. My latest work, soon to be published in International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, examines the factors influencing delegation choices within ASEAN agreements, particularly through the lens of transaction-costs theory.

Publications

• The Delegation of Discretionary Power in International Agreements: New Comparative Evidence from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Abstract Open Access Dataverse

  With Robert Thomson.
  International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 2024 (Accepted/In Press).
  According to the transaction-costs perspective on delegation, decision makers grant more discretion to implementers in relation to policies that are more complex and therefore require more specialist expertise to implement. Furthermore, decision makers grant less delegation to implementers when those implementers have divergent preferences and are therefore more costly to monitor. The transaction-costs perspective has implications for the design of international agreements, such as those adopted by the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). While delegation in the EU has been the subject of systematic research, delegation in ASEAN has not. We argue that ASEAN offers a particularly hard test of the transaction-costs perspective, particularly in relation to its propositions concerning implementers’ policy preferences. Notwithstanding the unique characteristics of ASEAN, the evidence provides strong support for the transaction-costs perspective both in terms of specialist expertise and implementers’ preferences. The new dataset we examine includes information on more than 8,500 major provisions within the 235 legal instruments adopted by ASEAN since 1967.

Working Papers

• Stability and Change in ASEAN's Policy Outputs. Abstract

  With Robert Thomson (Under Review).
  This paper describes and explains ASEAN's main policy outputs from its founding in 1967 to present. Notwithstanding ASEAN’s longevity and prominence, scholars’ and practitioners’ views on the of the organization vary from it being little more than a talking shop to a significant force for regional integration. The present study offers evidence and analyses that are relevant to assessing these views. The study develops a detailed inventory of all ASEAN legal instruments, including the over 200 instruments that are currently in force or have at least been adopted by ASEAN. It applies an established coding framework by the Comparative Agendas Project to identify the range of policy issues addressed by the organization throughout its history. The paper develops and tests explanations of why the scale, issue focus and content of ASEAN’s outputs have varied over time. These explanations consider the impact of punctuated equilibria, whereby the agenda shifts abruptly as a consequence of crises, and the effects of changes in the policy preferences of ASEAN members and administrative efficiency.

• Assessing ASEAN Compliance: New Evidence from Member States’ Ratification Records. Abstract Preprint

  This study examines the determinants that affect the ratification timeline for ASEAN agreements among different member states. Shifting the focus from prevalent discussions on compliance mechanisms, the study delves into how ASEAN members manage their regional commitments, with an emphasis on administrative capacity, institutional structure, and the degree of agreement with the contents of the treaty. Leveraging an original ASEAN ratification dataset, the study captures a comprehensive picture of intra-regional ratifications, encompassing both enforced and non-enforced legal instruments across member states. The study tests derived hypotheses on a set of 30 instruments from 1972 to 2020, each with explicit ratification deadlines. The findings indicate that more democratic ASEAN members typically delay ratification, while those with efficient bureaucracies expedite the process. Moreover, members expressing certain reservations about the agreement to be ratified are more likely to delay ratification. These findings have important implications for understanding the dynamics of ASEAN's regional integration process.

• Presiding Over Change: The Impact of ASEAN Chairmanship on Regional Policies (In Progress).

• Globalization and Coalition Size: Evidence from ASEAN-9 (In Progress).