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Why Aren’t There More Democratization Scholars on Twitter?
I’ve been active on Twitter for a few months now, and I am still struggling to connect there with others scholars who study authoritarian politics, democratization, and democratic breakdown. There are...
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Democratization Resources on Twitter
After lamenting the scarcity of democratization resources on Twitter in my last post, I’m realizing I might do some good by calling out some of the excellent people and organizations who are already...
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yom hashoah: how mass atrocities end
Reblogged from securing rights: Today is Yom HaShoah; for my non-Tribal readership, Holocaust Remembrance Day. For global Jewry, Yom HaShoah is a day of mourning, to reflect on the deaths of 5.7...
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Development as Ideology
In a blog post yesterday, Duke economist Marc Bellemare responded to a recent contrarian piece on Foreign Policy‘s Democracy Lab about development trends in Africa. In the FP essay, Rick Rowden argued...
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A Few Suggestions for Social Scientists New to Twitter
Earlier today, one scholar whose work I greatly admire asked another scholar whose work I greatly admire for advice on how to get started on Twitter. I liked Dan’s response, but I thought I’d take...
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I’m Down with Complexity and All, But…
In a recent Scientific American blog post called “Big Data Needs a Big Theory“, Geoffrey West calls for a unified theory of complex systems that will advance our understanding of, and capacity to...
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Challenges in Measuring Violent Conflict, Syria Edition
As part of a larger (but, unfortunately, gated) story on how the terrific new Global Data on Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) might help social scientists forecast violent conflicts, the New...
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Can Venezuela’s Maduro Survive Hyperinflation?
Venezuela is probably sliding into a period of hyperinflation, says the Cato Institute’s Steve Hanke. A picture in a recent blog post of his pretty much tells the story: The economic crisis of which...
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The Effervescence of Protest Power
As you probably know if you read this blog, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have taken to the streets in frustration over the past week after President Viktor Yanukovich reversed course and decided...
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Forecasting Coup-ish Events
This is a guest post written by Matt Reichert, Miguel Garces, Quratul-Ann Malik, and Ian Lustick of Lustick Consulting. Any questions about this post, these models, Lustick Consulting, or agent-based...
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Realists Versus Russianists on Ukraine
In my neck of the intellectual woods, views on the causes of Russia’s recent aggression in Ukraine split into two camps, which I’ll call the Realists and the Russianists. Some people straddle the two...
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China and Russia and What Could Have Happened
Twenty five years ago, I was strolling down Leningrad’s main drag, Nevsky Prospekt, with a clutch of other American undergraduates who had recently arrived for two months of intensive language study...
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Mining Texts to Generate Fuzzy Measures of Political Regime Type at Low Cost
Political scientists use the term “regime type” to refer to the formal and informal structure of a country’s government. Of course, “government” entails a lot of things, so discussions of regime type...
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Why political scientists should predict
Last week, Hans Noel wrote a post for Mischiefs of Faction provocatively titled “Stop trying to predict the future“. I say provocatively because, if I read the post correctly, Noel’s argument...
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The Political Context of Political Forecasting
In Seeing Like a State, James Scott describes how governments have tried to make their societies more legible in pursuit of their basic organizational mission—”to arrange the population in ways that...
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About That Decline in EU Contributions to UN Peacekeeping
A couple of days ago, Ambassador Samantha Power, the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, gave a speech on peacekeeping in Brussels that, among other things, lamented a decline in the...
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In China, Don’t Mistake the Trees for the Forest
Anyone who pays much attention to news of the world knows that China’s economy is cooling a bit. Official statistics—which probably aren’t true but may still be useful—show annual growth slowing from...
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