Academic

“Kountry” Package for STATA

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I may be late to the ball on this one, but in discussing a project that we're working on, fellow QP blogger Michael Allen recently pointed me to the "kountry" package for STATA. The package was created by Rafal Raciborski for the purposes of facilitating the creation of country codes and switching between codes provided by … Read more

Paul Ryan’s Foreign Policy Views

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  Much has been made lately of the idea that Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan as VP signals that he is doubling down on the economy for the election. Ryan is clearly known more for his activities on the House Budget Committee than anything else, and that’s fine, but just because it’s a major signal … Read more

Gotham City as the Paris Commune

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A spoiler warning before I get to the heart of the discussion: This blog entry is being posted the Monday after the release of The Dark Knight Rises.  The blog post deals with material presented in the film, plot elements, as well as some dialogue, so consider this a warning.  While I am not going to … Read more

(Mis)Understanding Political Science and Some Other Stuff

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Let me preface this by saying that I started writing this post a little while ago, so some of the content is a bit dated at this point. That said, over at the Duck, Steve Saideman has a post up that continues the ongoing discussion on political science, its utility, and its relationship with the … Read more

Human Rights and NGOs

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I've been working recently on quite a few projects that deal with human rights and NGOs, and today's BBC podcast has quite a bit of material that is relevant to these topics.  First, there's a story regarding a new law that is being debated in Russia that would require NGOs receiving funding from external sources … Read more

Why Poor Predictions are a Justification for More (not less) Research

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Stevens’ criticisms of political science in her NY Times OP-Ed were not criticisms of political science per se; rather, they were criticisms of the scientific process in general. It is a frustrating process. It would be nice if we could identify all the causes of a particular outcome after doing a limited amount of research. … Read more

Military Capabilities

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Phil Arena has a very cool post up wherein he explores a potential alternative to the ubiquitous CINC score for measuring military capabilities. This strikes me as something that is long overdue.  And there are a couple of things that I like about the measure just from taking a quick glance at it. First, given … Read more

On the Utility of IR Research

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At the Duck of Minerva, Josh Busby has a post on the gap between political science research/IR and the policymaking community. I don't have a whole lot to say about the specific content of Busby's post, aside from the fact that I think this is an interesting an important debate to have. (Also, please note that the links in the quotations were provided in Busby's original post).

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The Syrian Civil War II

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So it's official…ish. It's official-ish.  Or maybe not. The BBC reports that the UN Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, Herve Ladsous, seems to be the first official to publicly describe the Syrian civil war as a civil war, as opposed to something moving ever closer to that oh so elusive place. However, the article … Read more