Graduate student, nominate thyself

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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, … Read more

The whistleblower story is going to get a lot worse

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⚠️ This post was written in September 2019 and reflects the political situation at that time. Some details may be outdated. 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 … Read more

Democratic Presidential Candidates and Iran

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Image from Quantitative Peace research post

Much of the Democratic Presidential debates have not focused on foreign policy, but the United States’ policy towards Iran has pivotal implications for Iran, the Middle East generally, European foreign policy, as well as the choices Russia and China make in the region. As such, knowing the candidates’ positions towards Iran allows us to understand their goals, likely choices in a similar crisis, and the shape of their overall foreign policy agenda. To better understand that, I have collected a summary of the top ten Democratic candidates’ stated positions towards Iran.

Natural (base) selection: The potential costs of a U.S. military base in the Galapagos

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Galapagos Islands landscape photo

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Charmaine Willis, Andrew Stravers, and Carla Martinez Machain. Environmental activists were shocked to learn over the summer that the U.S. military will soon be deploying counternarcotics forces to an airfield on the island of San Cristóbal, in the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador. The Galápagos, known for inspiring Darwin’s … Read more

Development-Oriented Deployments in Latin America: Soft Power or Politicized Instrument?

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USNS Comfort Provides Care at a Temporary Medical Treatment Facility

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Carla Martinez Machain, Michael E. Flynn, and Alissandra Stoyan . They are all faculty in the Department of Political Science at Kansas State University. Can the U.S. military be an effective soft power instrument? Unlike the more traditional instruments of hard power (military force, sanctions, etc), soft … Read more

Politics and Peer Review in AMLO’s Mexico

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Image from Quantitative Peace research post

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Alissandra Stoyan and Carla Martinez Machain. They are, respectively, an assistant and an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Kansas State University. On February 21st, Mexico’s Fondo de Cultura Económica (a not-for-profit publisher partially funded by the Mexican Government that is often referred to as … Read more

A global analysis of how losing an election affects voter satisfaction with democracy

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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”.

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