The Quantitative Peace

This is a quick post that was inspired by some thinking I was doing yesterday while finishing up a project and a resulting tweet that seemed to garner a bit of attention (relative standards here, people). You can find it below. The punch line is this: You should probably nominate your own work for awards, whether they be papers, conference presentations, or (eventually) book awards. Even as a graduate student. This is something I really only realized you could do a couple of years ago. I came into graduate school knowing next to nothing about how the academic profession actually Continue reading Graduate student, nominate thyself→

A copy of the whistleblower’s report to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community was released this morning. I don’t have a lot to add beyond the analyses that are circulating around various media outlets, but there is one point that I think is worth highlighting that maybe isn’t yet getting the attention it deserves. The bulk of the story focuses on President Trump’s apparent efforts to leverage access and US military aid to get Ukrainian officials to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. The report itself is impressive insofar as it details a more protracted, and broader, effort Continue reading The whistleblower story is going to get a lot worse→

How easily do people turn against democracy? In a recent paper, we asked whether losing one election is enough to sour voters on the whole idea of democracy. We find that indeed it can be – if their democracy is relatively new. In addition to this difference between established and emerging democracies, we also find another important pattern: among the established democracies, the type of electoral system affects loser satisfaction, but in newer democracies, it matters much less. These two findings suggest that we need to considerably expand our understanding of “loser’s consent”.