Month: November 2012

Change & Stability in Physical Integrity Rights Abuse

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Over at Political Violence @ a Glance, Reed Wood makes a strong argument that global respect for human rights, measured via the global mean of the Political Terror Scale, has not increased over time.  Amanda Murdie goes on to demonstrate that the same stability over time is present in the Physical Integrity Rights Index from the CIRI Human Rights Data Project, which I co-direct with David Cingranelli and David Richards.  I agree whole-heartedly with Amanda’s and Reed’s assessments.  Like them, I see little reason to believe that large improvements in global human rights practices have taken place over the last 30 years, particularly with regard Continue reading Change & Stability in Physical Integrity Rights Abuse→

Mapping Leadership Tenure

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Confession time.  One of my favorite subreddits on reddit is r/mapporn; a subreddit dedicated to the most visually appealing maps from all historical periods and dealing with a variety of topics.  We, at QP, cannot get our fill of maps as we (especially Michael Flynn) have blogged about it a few times (see here, here, and here). Yesterday, this map of leadership tenure was posted from The Economist: The cutoff date of 1945 seems like a controversial choice and the single image of the map did not come with clear coding rules as how to decisions were made.  Being familiar with Continue reading Mapping Leadership Tenure→

Election Predictions 2012

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Discussing the election is all but inevitable.  Given my proclivity for numbers, I gathered opinions from 11 willing "experts," including 5 political scientists, 3 bloggers from the QP, 8 PhDs, and members from other related field (Public Policy, Communication, and Planning). Nine of the members are from Boise State.  Of course, to reward those who did better, there were points assigned to each category and I will be able to declare a winner likely by tomorrow. The Battleground States: Pennyslvania: 11-0 in favor of the Democrats winning.North Carolina:9-2 in favor of the Democrats winning.New Hampshire: 10-1 in favor of the Continue reading Election Predictions 2012→

Reading Downs and the likelihood of voting

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Since tomorrow is national election day in the US, the get out the vote drives are in full swing.  So, in celebration of voting, a few relevant articles on academics and voting: The rational voter paradox illustrated by Downs' An Economic Theory of Democracy suggests few should actually vote, but many do.  This may be due to voters not realizing what the costs to voting actually are, the benefits are imagined larger than they are, or there exists non-economic benefits (social or normative benefits). Brundt 1980 goes for the bounded rationality arguments on information and finds that discussing the rational voter model with undergraduates decreases Continue reading Reading Downs and the likelihood of voting→

Quick Plug on New Pubs

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Just some quick and dirty near-self-promotion. Michael Allen (Boise State) and Matthew DiGiuseppie (University of Mississippi)—both of whom are proud, card-carrying Binghamton PhDs—have a new piece on credit and alliance formation that is now available on International Studies Quarterly's early view. The link to the paper can be found here. Take a look.