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While much scholarship has studied trade between political rivals, collaboration in the realm of technological innovation remains largely unexplored. This paper seeks to explain variation in U.S. openness to collaboration with China and India in this sphere, focusing on an understudied aspect of foreign economic policy: immigration. A growing number of highly-educated scientists, engineers, programmers, and graduate students travel between the U.S. and China and India every year, resulting in an unprecedented level of “brain circulation” between these countries, yet the U.S. is more open to some human capital flows than to others. To explain this variation, the paper highlights the role that domestic interest groups, particularly capital and labor, play in shaping U.S. policy in this realm. In doing so, it advances a novel explanation for economic openness toward rival states, while also shedding new light on the political economy of power transitions.

This paper employs an aspirational constructivist approach that brings together social psychology and constructivism to provide causal microfoundations for the identities and status- seeking behavior of rising and declining power. It explains how the psychological need for collective self-esteem and value rationality, and construction of multiple ingroups and outgroups, shape its national identity, its status aspirations and international behavior. It applies this approach to post-Soviet Russia, where the elite converged around a status-driven national self-image that located Russia in the group of global great powers and the West. Contrary to oft-repeated warnings of a new Cold War, however, this identity generated diffuse national interests in social, rather than material, competition for global status, primarily with the United States.

Russia's national interests have not been defined on the basis of conventional cost-benefit assessments, perceptions of material threat, or the identities projected onto Russia by other countries. Aspirations to regain the international great power status that Russians believe their country enjoyed during the tsarist and Soviet past were critical to the creation of its present national identity and national security interests. This paper asks how Russian elites came to have these national interests in social competition for great power status. In trying to explain how national interests are created, I present a novel aspirational constructivist approach that draws heavily on social psychology to answer three fundamental questions: What are the sources of national identity? Why do multiple identities come into contention? How does one of these candidate national identities come to dominate the others and become "social fact," acting as "the" national identity that defines a country's core national interests? In developing the answers, we gain a better understanding of how foreign “others” enter into the definition of Russia’s national identity and the formation of its interests.

This paper characterizes behavior with “noisy” decision making for models of political interaction characterized by simultaneous binary decisions. Applications include: voting participation games, candidate entry, the volunteer's dilemma, and collective action problems with a contribution threshold. A simple graphical device is used to derive comparative statics and other theoretical properties of a “quantal response” equilibrium, and the resulting predictions are compared with Nash equilibria that arise in the limiting case of no noise. Many anomalous data patterns in laboratory experiments based on these games can be explained in this manner.

This paper characterizes behavior with “noisy” decision making for models of political interaction characterized by simultaneous binary decisions. Applications include: voting participation games, candidate entry, the volunteer's dilemma, and collective action problems with a contribution threshold. A simple graphical device is used to derive comparative statics and other theoretical properties of a “quantal response” equilibrium, and the resulting predictions are compared with Nash equilibria that arise in the limiting case of no noise. Many anomalous data patterns in laboratory experiments based on these games can be explained in this manner.

Studies carried out at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic confirmed that under the impression of fear individuals were more willing to tolerate violations of liberal-democratic norms and supported discriminatory policies to preserve public safety. But what are the potential consequences of the pandemic on citizens’ attitudes beyond its peak? We conducted an original experiment in which we manipulate individuals’ cognitive accessibility of their fears related to COVID-19 one and a half years after the onset of the pandemic. We fielded the experiment in Hungary and Romania–two cases most likely to see such attitudes amplify under the condition of fear. Our intervention was successful in elevating respondents’ levels of worry, anxiety, and fear when thinking about infectious diseases like COVID-19. However, these emotions did not affect individuals’ levels of rightwing authoritarianism, nationalism, or outgroup hostility, or their preferences for specific discriminatory policies aimed to fight a potential resurgence of COVID-19.

Studies carried out at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic confirmed that under the impression of fear individuals were more willing to tolerate violations of liberal-democratic norms and supported discriminatory policies to preserve public safety. But what are the potential consequences of the pandemic on citizens’ attitudes beyond its peak? We conducted an original experiment in which we manipulate individuals’ cognitive accessibility of their fears related to COVID-19 one and a half years after the onset of the pandemic. We fielded the experiment in Hungary and Romania–two cases most likely to see such attitudes amplify under the condition of fear. Our intervention was successful in elevating respondents’ levels of worry, anxiety, and fear when thinking about infectious diseases like COVID-19. However, these emotions did not affect individuals’ levels of rightwing authoritarianism, nationalism, or outgroup hostility, or their preferences for specific discriminatory policies aimed to fight a potential resurgence of COVID-19.