About

Tyler Pratt is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on contested authority in global governance, specifically how states exploit, challenge, and undermine multilateral institutions and the consequences of these actions for international cooperation. One area of his work examines how the proliferation of overlapping international institutions reshapes bargaining, cooperation, and the distribution of authority among states. Another area investigates the politics of noncompliance with international law. His research has been published in leading journals such as the American Political Science Review, International Organization, The Journal of Politics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, International Studies Quarterly, and Review of International Organizations. Additionally, he has interests in state reputation in foreign policy, the governance of emerging technologies, and applied network analysis. Tyler Pratt teaches courses on international law and cooperation, international organizations, network analysis, and theory-building in political science. Before joining UNC, he was an Assistant Professor at Yale University. He earned his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2018, an M.A. in International Policy Studies from Stanford University in 2010, and a B.A. in International Affairs from the University of Georgia in 2008. Between 2010 and 2012, he worked in the Departments of Homeland Security and State.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Economics
• Law
• Social Science
• Economic system
• Computer Science
• Microeconomics
• Psychology
• Law and economics
• Public relations
• Positive economics
• Finance
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Innovation and Interdependence: Evidence from Gene-Editing Technology

  International Studies Quarterly · 2025-03-17

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Technological breakthroughs carry great promise but often escalate economic competition and heighten public anxiety, creating new challenges for governments. We argue that breakthroughs trigger two distinct mechanisms that reshape regulatory politics: (1) accelerated incentives for regulatory arbitrage and (2) the potential for controversies to spark international public backlash. First, technological advancement generates forum-shopping behavior as private actors race to develop the new technology. Researchers and firms may seek to evade national rules by relocating to more permissive jurisdictions. Second, public unease about new technologies creates the potential for backlash in the wake of controversial applications. This backlash can spill across borders: accidents or misuse in one jurisdiction undermine support for research and commercial development elsewhere. Together, these processes link the regulatory fate of states, undermining their ability to regulate in isolation. We test and find evidence for these mechanisms in the domain of gene editing, a field that has been transformed by the introduction of CRISPR technology in 2012. Our theory and findings shed new light on the regulatory politics of breakthrough technologies.

  PublisherDOI

• Information Disorder and Global Politics

  International Organization · 2025-11-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Information is a key variable in International Relations, underpinning theories of foreign policy, inter-state cooperation, and civil and international conflict. Yet IR scholars have only begun to grapple with the consequences of recent shifts in the global information environment. We argue that information disorder —a media environment with low barriers to content creation, rapid spread of false or misleading material, and algorithmic amplification of sensational and fragmented narratives—will reshape the practice and study of International Relations. We identify three major implications of information disorder on international politics. First, information disorder distorts how citizens access and evaluate political information, creating effects that are particularly destabilizing for democracies. Second, it damages international cooperation by eroding shared focal points and increasing incentives for noncompliance. Finally, information disorder shifts patterns of conflict by intensifying societal cleavages, enabling foreign influence, and eroding democratic advantages in crisis bargaining. We conclude by outlining an agenda for future research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Smoke and Mirrors: Strategic Messaging and the Politics of Noncompliance

  American Political Science Review · 2025-08-07 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Public allegations of international law violations are common in international politics. When do these accusations generate international backlash for governments? We argue that political costs hinge on a rhetorical battle to shape perceptions of the government’s behavior. Governments use strategic messaging to contest information, challenge the appropriateness of international law, or cite extenuating circumstances. International organizations (IOs) counter government rhetoric to reinforce the law. These competing messages shape support for punishment among citizens and political elites. We test our argument with survey experiments measuring perceptions of alleged military aggression and human rights violations. Among the US public and a global sample of diplomatic elites, foreign government denials and claims about mitigating circumstances reduce punitive attitudes. IO rebuttals counter denials but can only partially neutralize other claims. We offer a new framework for analyzing the politics of noncompliance and present novel evidence illuminating the strengths and limitations of IOs in enforcing international law.

  PublisherDOI

• Smoke and Mirrors: Strategic Messaging and the Politics of Noncompliance

  UNC Libraries · 2025-08-14

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Public allegations of international law violations are common in international politics. When do these accusations generate international backlash for governments? We argue that political costs hinge on a rhetorical battle to shape perceptions of the government’s behavior. Governments use strategic messaging to contest information, challenge the appropriateness of international law, or cite extenuating circumstances. International organizations (IOs) counter government rhetoric to reinforce the law. These competing messages shape support for punishment among citizens and political elites. We test our argument with survey experiments measuring perceptions of alleged military aggression and human rights violations. Among the US public and a global sample of diplomatic elites, foreign government denials and claims about mitigating circumstances reduce punitive attitudes. IO rebuttals counter denials but can only partially neutralize other claims. We offer a new framework for analyzing the politics of noncompliance and present novel evidence illuminating the strengths and limitations of IOs in enforcing international law.

  PublisherDOI

• Value differentiation, policy change and cooperation in international regime complexes

  Review of International Political Economy · 2023-11-02 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In many issue areas in international political economy (IPE), interstate cooperation is governed by a dense network of distinct but overlapping international institutions. Whether this environment of ‘regime complexity’ strengthens or undermines cooperation is a subject of intense debate. Some argue that overlapping institutions enhance legitimacy and flexibility, while others claim that opportunistic forum shopping enables states to escape compliance with rigorous rules. This article reconciles this debate, demonstrating that regime complexity has contrasting effects depending on the degree of value differentiation among institutions. In issue areas where undifferentiated institutions function as substitutes, forum shopping will reduce the regime’s ability to discipline state behavior. However, in issue areas where institutions are differentiated by value – i.e. the benefits they provide increase as rules become more rigorous – institutional overlap can increase policy change among states. I demonstrate these dynamics formally and provide empirical evidence in a comparative analysis of the regime complexes for election observation and forest-related carbon offsets.

  PublisherDOI

• Hierarchy and differentiation in international regime complexes: a theoretical framework for comparative research

  Review of International Political Economy · 2023 · 91 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Economic system

  The concept of international regime complexity offers a useful lens for examining the increasing density of international institutions in global governance. A growing literature in International Political Economy (IPE) identifies clusters of overlapping institutions in many important policy areas, yet some scholars argue that complexity undermines governance effectiveness, while others perceive distinct advantages over unified institutions. To bring coherence to these findings, we present a general theoretical framework that characterizes regime complexes based on two structural features: Authority relations and institutional differentiation. These dimensions jointly determine the opportunities and constraints that states and other actors confront as they navigate institutional rules. As a result, they shape important outcomes, such as policy adjustment, regime shifting and competitive regime creation. The article proposes testable hypotheses regarding the effects of authority and differentiation, and we assess their correspondence with the eight regime complexes examined by the five companion articles in this special issue. We further identify a set of dynamic processes that shape the evolution of regime complexes over time. Our framework strengthens the foundation for comparative analysis of regime complexes and charts a new agenda for the research program.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Membership Patterns in Economic Institutions

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2023-07-18

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• 3 Membership Patterns in Economic Institutions

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2023-07-06

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Strategies of Contestation: International Law, Domestic Audiences, and Image Management

  The Journal of Politics · 2022 · 23 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  International relations scholars frequently argue that violations of international law generate political costs for governments. Yet we know little about whether governments can evade responsibility for noncompliance, which may be a low-salience issue for domestic audiences. We propose a theory of image management whereby leaders strategically contest international law violations to influence citizen perceptions of the government. Drawing on communications scholarship, we disaggregate government image into four underlying dimensions: morality, performance, lawfulness, and allegiance. A government’s response to violations is designed to influence the dimensions of image valued by its political coalition. We develop a typology of response strategies and test their effects in a survey experiment examining violations of the torture, trade, and chemical weapons regimes. Our results offer fresh insights for compliance scholarship. Governments can mitigate backlash and leverage allegations of noncompliance for political ends, but their strategies are constrained by the foreign policy preferences of supporters.

  PublisherDOI

• Dynamic Stochastic Blockmodel Regression for Network Data: Application to International Militarized Conflicts

  Figshare · 2022-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  The decision to engage in military conflict is shaped by many factors, including state- and dyad-level characteristics as well as the state’s membership in geopolitical coalitions. Supporters of the democratic peace theory, for example, hypothesize that the community of democratic states is less likely to wage war with each other. Such theories explain the ways in which nodal and dyadic characteristics affect the evolution of conflict patterns over time via their effects on group memberships. To test these arguments, we develop a dynamic model of network data by combining a hidden Markov model with a mixed-membership stochastic blockmodel that identifies latent groups underlying the network structure. Unlike existing models, we incorporate covariates that predict dynamic node memberships in latent groups as well as the direct formation of edges between dyads. While prior substantive research often assumes the decision to engage in international militarized conflict is independent across states and static over time, we demonstrate that conflict is driven by states’ evolving membership in geopolitical blocs. Our analysis of militarized disputes from 1816 to 2010 identifies two distinct blocs of democratic states, only one of which exhibits unusually low rates of conflict. Changes in monadic covariates like democracy shift states between coalitions, making some states more pacific but others more belligerent. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kosuke Imai

  Harvard University

  23 shared

• Santiago Olivella

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  12 shared

• Santiago Olivella

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  11 shared

• Christina L. Davis

  5 shared

• Julia C. Morse

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  2 shared

• C. Randall Henning

  American University

  1 shared