Quantitative and formal analysis of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics.
So I'm a little late getting to this, but Tom Coburn is at it again—more successfully this time, it appears. The short version is that Coburn was able to get an amendment through that prohibits the National Science Foundation from funding political science research, with the exception of research that "promotes the national security or … Read more
It's been a while since my last post, so I thought it was time to put up at least a little something: Senate Republicans are, for the moment, blocking Chuck Hagel's nomination as Defense Secretary. Admittedly, my attention to current events has been spotty over the past couple of months, but it seems that every time … Read more
Two new pieces from QP authors. First, Michael Flynn has a solo-authored piece in an upcoming Foreign Policy Analysis that has an early view avaible. Abstract: How does political competition among domestic actors influence foreign policy choice? Studies examining these questions often focus on the role of economic or partisan interests, and how they influence … Read more
The news surrounding Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel and John Brennan as Secretary of Defense and Director of the CIA (respectively) has primarily been focused on the “controversial” Hagel’s previous statements and positions. Republican commentators have been complaining about Hagel’s nomination, claiming that his nomination sends a powerful signal that the Obama administration is putting more … Read more
A bit of shameless self-promotion before the holidays. The kind folks at International Studies Quarterly have put a new article by Colin Barry, Chad Clay, and myself up on early view. The link to the article, entitled "Avoiding the Spotlight: Human Rights Shaming and Foreign Direct Investment", is here, and here's the abstract: Nonstate actors, … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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. Michael FlynnMichael … Read more
Just a couple of links, comments, etc. Six seismologists in Italy have recently been convicted and sentenced to six years in prison (each) for issuing a "falsely reassuring statement" prior to the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy (BBC Article). The seismologists have been charged with manslaughter over the deaths of over 300 people in the … Read more