International Treaty Ratification and Leader Turnover

Political leaders are ultimately responsible for their country?s foreign policy, but our understanding of how executive turnover affects the likelihood of international treaty ratification remains limited. For contributing to this debate, I define leader change as the replacement of the executive leader by a new one who relies on different social groups for support. Focusing then on those cases where new leaders can assume office only from predecessors who plausibly supported treaty ratification, I expect that ? in light of the predecessor?s support for an agreement and the change in the domestic support base ? leadership turnover makes ratification less likely. The empirical implication is tested with quantitative methods using data on multilateral treaties of the post-Cold War era. The main findings and a series of additional analyses provide strong and robust evidence for the theoretical argument. This research sheds new light on the determinants of multilateral cooperation as well as the role of government leaders in international affairs and foreign-policy decision-making

Counterbalancing, Spatial Dependence, and Peer Group Effects

Previous studies identified several domestic factors that may influence a country?s level of structural coup-proofing, i.e., counterbalancing strategies that shall prevent internal groups from seizing power via a coup d?�tat. We suggest that a country?s level of counterbalancing is also affected by such policies in what we term countries? ?peer groups.? When deciding the appropriate level of counterbalancing, rulers may be affected by external information flows from a ?peer group? with similar structural coup-risk characteristics (institutions) or a similar coup-risk experience (coup history). Using maximum likelihood spatial lag models and data in 1976?2005, we find that leaders learn from and emulate counterbalancing in other states, but rather only through an ?experiential peer group.

Naval Forces and Civil-Military Relations

While the importance of navies for international affairs is widely documented, their influence in domestic politics remains less well understood. This research offers the first comparative account of how states? naval forces affect civil-military relations. Does the navy matter for military attempts to seize government power? The urban population and, especially, middle class elements in the capital city are potentially more capable (if willing) to create the conditions for the armed forces to overthrow the government. Because naval forces are more strongly linked to these societal elements due to recruitment practice and the location of their bases, countries with a larger navy in relation to the army could be more likely to see coups d?�tat. The empirical findings, based on the analysis of time-series cross-section data on a sample of all states between 1970 and 2007, provide strong support for the theory. Several robustness checks further increase the confidence in the results

Daily life stress and the cortisol awakening response : testing the anticipation hypothesis

Acknowledgments We thank Paul Stewart for his contribution to data collection and Dr Matthew Jones for programming the handheld computers. Author Contributions Conceived and designed the experiments: WS DJP. Performed the experiments: DJP. Analyzed the data: WS. Wrote the paper: WS DJP.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Imprisonment and Terrorism

While policymakers frequently praise the impact of law enforcement for addressing the threat of terrorism, several cases suggest that the imprisonment of terrorists and potential perpetrators may actually lead to (more) radicalization and, ultimately, a higher risk of terrorism. We take systematic stock of the arguments linking terrorism with incarceration and analyze newly collected data on worldwide prison populations. The results from quantitative analysis highlight that an increase in prison population is correlated with a decline in the number of terrorist attacks, in particular its domestic form. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this finding for academic and policy circles

Regional Integration Support: A Positive Externality toward Migration Attitudes

Public opinion in favor of regional unification is usually seen as key for successfully implementing such integration projects. We argue that, as a positive externality, it can also foster support for migration. Focusing on the case of Europe, we use in-group and out-group dynamics as a starting point and claim that citizens who are more supportive of EU unification tend to have dual-identity and more cosmopolitan attitudes, which is linked to more support for migration from outside the region. We employ hierarchical models using all existing rounds of the European Social Survey and complement this with a panel-data analysis based on the German Longitudinal Election Data to exploit the individual-level evolution of attitudes over time. The empirical findings strongly support the theoretical expectations, and they shed new light on our understanding of how public attitudes toward migration are formed