Quantitative and formal analysis of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics.
It is a week before the American tradition of "Black Friday" starting on Thursday, and I have not done an updated list on "Gifts for Political Scientists" since 2010, so here is my proposed list for 2013. Trying to find gifts for that special poltiical scientist in your life can be quite difficult. Given the … Read more
I’ve been thinking about the role of evolutionary psychology in political science, after it was used in a couple of recent presentations. My concern is that political scientists are borrowing a method or paradigm from another discipline without borrowing the critiques that need to go with it. Discussion of some of the normative issues around … Read more
A part of my responsibilities as a post-doc here at Alabama entails helping faculty with seeking out external funding for projects. One of these projects has involved developing a program to promote educational outreach throughout the state. In the course of this work I’ve been digging through some data on educational attainment rates in Alabama. … Read more
Recently, my wife discovered the Rap Stats tool at Rap Genius, which plots the relative frequency of words and phrases in rap songs from 1988 to the present. Of course, when she showed it to me, my immediate thought was to start plotting political words and phrases and see if we could pick up any … Read more
This past Monday the Supreme Court agreed to hear a Florida death penalty case that deals with how states determine whether a death row inmate is mentally disabled. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for states to execute someone who is mentally disabled, as it violated the Eight Amendment’s restrictions on … Read more
I am currently in the process of entirely rewriting and redesigning one of my earliest academic papers that I want to update with the context of better data and methods in evaluating the hypotheses I initially proposed. That is, I am writing the same paper a second time. As part of this process, I am … Read more
Everyone has their own way of teaching methods, but in this entry I thought I’d share a brief exercise that I thought worked well. This code was developed when I was the teaching assistant for a second-semester methods class focusing on regression. Specifically, this was a section of the class from the first few weeks … Read more
I’ve been sending articles out for review for a few years now, and I’ve also had the opportunity to review several papers for journals. Having been through each side of the ordeal, I’ve begun to form some opinions on the peer review process as a whole. This is something other political scientists have written extensively about. For example, … Read more
Forcing the government to shutdown, instead of fully implementing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), may seem like a huge misstep by the Republican party, as most Americans would rather see the implementation of the ACA instead of the government shutdown. But as I discuss below, Republicans may be able to walk away from this whole … Read more
Over at IPE@UNC, Lindsay Tello discusses the article on foreign direct investment and human rights shaming that Colin Barry, Michael Flynn, and I have in this month’s International Studies Quarterly. Here’s the abstract: Non-state actors, such as international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and multi- national corporations (MNCs), have attained an increasingly prominent role in modern world affairs. While previous research has … Read more