Gino Pauselli

Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PhD, Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

M.A., Statistics, University of Pennsylvania

I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University (2023-2024). I obtained my PhD in Political Science and Master in Statistics from the University of Pennsylvania (2023). Before my graduate studies, I received my B.A. from the University of San Andres (Argentina, 2011), and my M.A. in International Studies from Torcuato Di Tella University (Argentina, 2018).

My research uses advanced statistical methods to explore the politics of norms adoption and resistance, focusing on the impact of external actors on policy change. I am also interested in LGBT politics, the role of non-state actors in international relations, and border politics. My research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, Research and Politics, and Journal of Democracy, among others, and awarded by the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association.

I founded and run the workshop Relaciones Internacionales Empíricas (Empirical International Relations), aimed at being a space to promote and strengthen research by IR scholars based in Latin America.

I grew up in Posadas, a Northern city in Argentina, capital of the Misiones province. Before coming to Penn, I worked in a consulting firm in Buenos Aires, Argentina on applied research on foreign aid and human rights, in the MERCOSUR Institute of Public Policy on Human Rights, and in the Argentine Council for International Relations, a top Latin American think-tank on foreign policy and international relations.

Articles

2024. Mapping Advocacy Support: Geographic Proximity to Outgroups and Human Rights Promotion, Journal of Peace Research.
2024. Why Autocracies Fear LGBTQ+ Rights, Journal of Democracy (with María-José Urzúa).
2024. A Matter of Journal Choice: A Conjoint Experiment on Submission Choices of Latin American IR Scholars, International Studies Perspectives (with Florencia Montal and Patricio Yamin).
2023. Shaping the Liberal International Order from the Inside: A Natural Experiment on China's Influence in the UN Human Rights Council, Research and Politics 10(3) (with Francisco Urdínez and Federico Merke).
2023. Is the Bad News About Compliance Bad News About Human Rights? Evidence From the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, International Studies Quarterly 67(2) (with Florencia Montal).
2022. Segmented Communities in the Global South: Where Do IR Argentine Scholars Publish and Why?, PS: Political Science and Politics 55(3), 519-524 (with Florencia Montal and Patricio Yamin).
2021. New Donors, New Goals? Altruism, Self-Interest, and Domestic Political Support in Development Cooperation in Latin America, Latin American Politics and Society 63(4), 45-73.
2015. In the shadow of the state: Think tanks and foreign policy in Latin America, International Journal: Canada’s Journal of Global Policy Analysis 70(4): 613-628 (with Federico Merke).
2013. Theories of International Relations and the Explanation of Foreign Aid, Iberoamerican Journal of Development Studies 2(1): 72-92.
2013. Foreign Policy and Human Rights Advocacy: An Exercise in Measurement and Explanation, Human Rights Review 14(2): 131-155 (with Federico Merke).

Book Chapters

Forthcoming. International Human Rights Organizations: From Revolution to Irrelevance?, in Barnett, Michael and Duncan Snidal, Oxford Handbook of International Institutions, Oxford University Press (with Beth Simmons).
2019. Foreign Aid’s Motivations: Theoretical Arguments and Empirical Evidence, in Olivié, Iliana and Aitor Pérez, Aid Power and Politics, Routledge.
2017. South–South cooperation and the governance of development aid in South America, in Riggirozzi, Pia and Christopher Wylde, Handbook of South American Governance, Routledge.

Under Friendly Fire: A Study of Foreign Criticism Effects on LGBT Policy Change

[Book project]

The effect of human rights criticism on the adoption of progressive and restrictive human rights policies is a matter of scholarly debate. Some scholars argue that criticism can have a positive effect on human rights change, while others contend that it can lead to backlash. This project examines the ability of the international community to stop or exacerbate human rights violations through state-to-state non-material pressure in the form of public criticism. I argue that the ability of a country to influence another target country's policy depends on their social relations. Specifically, the effectiveness of international pressure depends on the social relationship a target country has with senders. When states criticize an ingroup, this sends a strong signal to other ingroup observers about the expected standard of behavior and potential social sanction of violating the norm. However, the public condemnation of an outgroup creates a sense of national identity threat and induces more norm violation.

I focus on LGBT rights as a case study of recent changes in rights protected and violated by states. While some countries have advanced rights in this area, others have witnessed a regression. This makes the issue of LGBT rights a contemporary contested issue in world politics where progress and backlash are both observed. I present a theory of state-to-state pressure to explain how criticism has both direct and indirect effects and can provoke positive as well as negative outcomes. I test my theory using a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative analysis of a dataset of state-to-state human rights criticism, geocoded, text, and public opinion data with 50 interviews with diplomats, activists, bureaucrats, journalists, and scholars. My findings suggest that state-to-state criticism can be an effective tool for promoting human rights change, but its effectiveness depends on the social relationship between the sender and the target of criticism. This project contributes to the growing body of literature on the role of social relations in international relations. It also provides new insights into the effectiveness of state-to-state human rights criticism as a tool for promoting human rights change.

My job market paper summarizes my theory and main empirical findings.

From Barriers to Abuse: Border Hardening and Torture Allegations (with Beth Simmons)

Serious human rights violations have commonly been reported in border regions and against irregular migrants. We develop a theory of torture by persons whose job it is to secure the border from irregular entry. We contend that when states announce highly visible and costly border hardening programs, their border and immigration officials (BIOs) tend to internalize these priorities and interpret them as license to enforce the border at all costs. We find that when states announce new or extended border walls, torture allegations by BIOs increase. In addition, there is corroborative evidence in the press releases of Europe’s regional border security agency, Frontex, that attention to security increases and attention to human rights wanes when reporting on situations in states with border walls. Taken together, these results suggest a tension between border hardening and human rights, and an urgent need to critically examine border hardening from a human rights lens.

Critical Ties: How Reliable Information Suppliers Influence States' Criticism by International Organizations (with Florencia Montal and María-José Urzúa)

This study explores the role of reliable information suppliers in shaping the decisions of international organizations (IOs) to publicly criticize states' actions. Focusing on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACmHR), we examine how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with established ties to the Commission provide crucial information that influences the IACmHR’s critical pronouncements. We propose that IOs are more likely to issue public criticisms when they have access to information from NGOs that are not only knowledgeable but also deemed reliable through repeated interactions. Using an original dataset of press releases issued by the IACmHR from 1996 to 2020, we demonstrate that countries with a higher number of local NGOs participating in IACmHR hearings are more likely to be subject to critical press releases. Furthermore, we find that NGOs' expertise in particular human rights' domains significantly correlates with targeted criticisms on those issues. These results highlight the importance of NGO-IO ties in the flow of reliable information and show the key role of trusted information suppliers in the international advocacy landscape. Our study contributes to the understanding of how IOs navigate information asymmetries and emphasizes the strategic importance of reliable information in promoting states' accountability.

Finding the Right Forum: Non-State Actor Engagement in International Organizations (with Rachel Schoner)

How does institutional design affect non-state actors' preference for regional and global organizations? While existing research highlights the importance of international organizations' activity, it often treats civil society actors as exogenous and their involvement as given. In contrast, our approach considers these actors as strategic decision-makers, choosing where to engage based on the costs and benefits associated with each IO's institutional design. Focusing on the human rights regime, where non-state actors can submit complaints to multiple fora (but not simultaneously), we compare the Inter-American System of Human Rights and the UN human rights treaty system using novel individual petition data. Our findings show that when actors have the ability to receive a legally binding decision, petitions increase in such organizations and decrease in alternative ones. In the absence of Court jurisdiction, UN bodies become a more attractive organization for individual petitioners given the decreased time until a decision.

The Rainbow Ripple Effect: LGBT Advocacy and the Expansion of Foreign Aid (with Simone Dietrich)

What drives countries to promote sexual minority rights through foreign aid? While LGBT rights gained prominence in development cooperation, support for sexual minorities remains highly uneven across donors. We argue that this variation is explained by the role of donor-based international NGOs (INGOs) specializing in LGBT rights. In particular, the presence of LGBT INGOs leads to higher levels of LGBT aid by providing expertise and advocating for investment in contexts where norms remain contested. Using a novel dataset on LGBT aid from 29 Western donor countries, we find robust evidence that INGOs increase donors’ commitments to LGBT rights. Furthermore, we show that the influence of LGBT INGOs is amplified when governments adopt foreign policies that prioritize minority protections. Our findings challenge existing explanations centered on public opinion or domestic political ideology and demonstrate that INGOs play a crucial role in shaping donor strategies on rights-based aid. We contribute to the literature on civil society’s influence in foreign policy, the politics of inclusive development, and the broader understanding of norm diffusion through international cooperation.

Border Walls as Cooperation Failures (with Michael Kenwick and Beth Simmons)

Border hardening is a defining feature of contemporary politics. Research suggests many possible causes, from security imperatives, to intensifying human mobility, to vague concerns often bundled as “border anxiety.” Yet, even in the face of intense globalization pressures, many states would benefit from well-managed and efficient border governance. What, then, explains the variance in border hardening? We advance a unified approach that recasts border management as a cooperation problem that can be plagued by bilateral trust deficits. Border hardening is a (distant) second-best option when a state cannot trust that their neighbor is willing or able to reciprocate in managing problems arising from intensifying spatial interdependence. We contend that trust influences whether, how much, and where borders will be hardened. Using new geolocated data on border barriers and an innovative empirical measure of trust, we find support for this argument. Walls are more likely to be constructed by low-trust neighbors. We then conduct a geo-spatial analysis of wall location and find that neighbors with the lowest levels of trust locate walls near potential security threats. We call for a research agenda in international relations that complements the societal focus common in the study of borderlands, and which situates bordering in a strategic bilateral context in which trust relationships feature highly.

Click here to download my CV.

Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students. Awarded to 10 graduate students across the University of Pennsylvania

Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. Awarded to 10 graduate students across the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts and Sciences

2011-2017, Teaching Assistant, 'Theories of International Relations' (undergraduate), University of San Andres (Argentina) [Instructor: Federico Merke]

2014-2016, Teaching Assistant, 'International Politics' (graduate), Foreign Service Institute, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of Argentina [Instructor: Federico Merke]

2018, Teaching Assistant, 'International Political Economy' (undergraduate), University of Pennsylvania [Instructor: Ryan Brutger]

2019, Teaching Assistant, 'International Law & Institutions' (undergraduate), University of Pennsylvania [Instructor: Mark Pollack]

2019-2022 Teaching Assistant, 'International Law' (undergraduate), University of Pennsylvania [Instructor: Beth Simmons]

2020-2021, Instructor, 'Graduate Research Design Seminar' (graduate), University Torcuato Di Tella

2021, Instructor, 'Data Analysis for Development Cooperation' (graduate), National University of San Martín

2023-2024, Instructor, 'Data Management and Analysis' (graduate), University of San Andrés

2023-2024, 'Global LGBT Politics' (undergraduate), University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign