Keeping Up With Which Joneses: Spatial Diffusion of Rule of Law Through Economic International Organizations

I develop a theory of spatial diffusion of the rule of law, where “space” is conceptualized as shared memberships in economic international organizations (IOs). I argue that the rule of law diffuses as a result of economic competition and socialization. Outside evaluators, such as international leaders, activists, and most importantly, international firms and investors, often assess states’ attractiveness as a business venue by comparing them to similar states. The natural reference group for such comparisons is not just geographical neighbors, but also states with shared memberships in economic IOs. Responding to this evaluation, states identify members of their own reference groups and view them as competition for investment. As a result, states within the same reference groups converge on issues related to lowering domestic economic risks, which are referred to by the umbrella term “domestic rule of law.” The resulting process of policy convergence is further aided by socialization. Socialization may involve emulation of policies of similar states or “active” learning through norm entrepreneurs, who use the reference groups for both evaluation and access to their target audiences. I capture the theorized spatial processes using a multiparametric spatiotemporal autoregressive model (m-STAR) and find support for the prediction

Bean Counters: The Effect of Soy Tariffs on Change in Republican Vote Share Between the 2016 and 2018 Elections.

How do trade wars affect presidential support? President Trump\u27s aggressive tariffs on China despite his largely rural electoral support base provide a unique opportunity to analyze the relationship between international trade policy and domestic support. If trade-related considerations were ever decisive to American voters, the stark decrease in soy prices, a direct effect of Trump-initiated tariffs immediately preceding the 2018 midterm election, serves as a critical test for studying their effect. This letter shows a robust inverse relationship between county-level soybean production and the change in Republican vote share between the 2016 and 2018 congressional elections

Modeling Structural Selection in Disaggregated Event Data

Growing availability of disaggregated data, such as data on activity of subnational groups (e.g. protest campaigns, insurgents, terrorist groups, political parties or movements), has raised new types of theoretical and statistical challenges. In particular, rather than random, the observability and availability of disaggregated data are often a function of specific structural processes—an issue we refer to as structural selection. For example, domestic terrorist attacks or protester violence are conditional on the formation of domestic terrorist groups or protester movements in the first place. As a result, analytical inferences derived from subnational or other types of disaggregated data may suffer from structural selection bias, which is a type of sample selection bias. We propose a simple and elegant statistical approach to ameliorate such bias and demonstrate the advantages of this approach using a Monte Carlo example. We further illustrate the importance of accounting for structural processes by replicating three prominent empirical studies of government–opposition behavior and find that structural selection affects many of the inferences drawn from the observable data

Фізична чи природнича географія України?

Розглянуто необхідність та можливості заміни у вищих навчальних закладах України курсу «Фізична географія України» на курс «Природнича географія України». Зазначено, що курс «Фізична географія України» не відповідає сучасним вимогам підготовки студентів-географів рівня «бакалавр», оскільки розглядає лише натуральну природу України без її корінних антропогенних змін. Запропоновано в курсі «Природнича географія України» виокремити три розділи, присвячені фізичній, історичній та антропогенній географії. Кожний із названих розділів слід вивчати упродовж одного семестру, а по закінченні приступити до вивчення курсу «Ландшафтна географія України», що теж включає у себе три частини: натуральне (класичне), історичне та антропогенне ландшафтознавство. Фундаментальні бакалаврські курси: «Антропогенна географія України» і «Ландшафтна географія України» будуть основою магістерських курсів «Конструктивна географія України» і «Конструктивне ландшафтознавство України»

Keeping Up With Which Joneses: Spatial Diffusion of Rule of Law Through Economic International Organizations

I develop a theory of spatial diffusion of the rule of law, where “space” is conceptualized as shared memberships in economic international organizations (IOs). I argue that the rule of law diffuses as a result of economic competition and socialization. Outside evaluators, such as international leaders, activists, and most importantly, international firms and investors, often assess states’ attractiveness as a business venue by comparing them to similar states. The natural reference group for such comparisons is not just geographical neighbors, but also states with shared memberships in economic IOs. Responding to this evaluation, states identify members of their own reference groups and view them as competition for investment. As a result, states within the same reference groups converge on issues related to lowering domestic economic risks, which are referred to by the umbrella term “domestic rule of law.” The resulting process of policy convergence is further aided by socialization. Socialization may involve emulation of policies of similar states or “active” learning through norm entrepreneurs, who use the reference groups for both evaluation and access to their target audiences. I capture the theorized spatial processes using a multiparametric spatiotemporal autoregressive model (m-STAR) and find support for the prediction.This article has been accepted for publication in Foreign Policy Analysis. Published by Oxford University Press.</p

Dangerous liaisons An endogenous model of international trade and human rights

This article applies recent advances in network analysis to highlight a central tension faced by policymakers – balancing the benefits of engaging with the international system and the associated domestic policy costs. International trade rewards certain domestic practices, such as respect for human rights. Enforcing such practices, however, is politically costly and sometimes prohibitive to state leaders who rely on political repression to stay in power. In such cases, domestic elites often resort to an alternative strategy of securing the benefits of international trade – setting up indirect trade channels through intermediary states. These competing incentives are modeled within a single framework using a formal network game in which states form trade-links (direct or indirect) with other states, while simultaneously choosing their optimal level of domestic human rights protections. The model suggests that there may be an inverse relationship between a state’s embeddedness within a network of indirect trade and respect for human rights: indirect trade channels serve as loopholes that allow domestically troubled states to enjoy the benefits of trade without pressure for domestic improvement. The predictions are supported by the results of the empirical analyses of the international trade and repression data (1987–2000), conducted using a coevolutionary actor-oriented longitudinal-network model – a statistical estimator that closely mimics the theoretical model.This is a manuscript of an article from Journal of Peace Research 53 (2016): 409, doi:10.1177/0022343316629605. Posted with permission.</p

Bean Counters: The Effect of Soy Tariffs on Change in Republican Vote Share Between the 2016 and 2018 Elections.

How do trade wars affect presidential support? President Trump's aggressive tariffs on China despite his largely rural electoral support base provide a unique opportunity to analyze the relationship between international trade policy and domestic support. If trade-related considerations were ever decisive to American voters, the stark decrease in soy prices, a direct effect of Trump-initiated tariffs immediately preceding the 2018 midterm election, serves as a critical test for studying their effect. This letter shows a robust inverse relationship between county-level soybean production and the change in Republican vote share between the 2016 and 2018 congressional elections.This unpublished article is cited as Chyzh,O.V., Urbatsch, R. Bean Counters: The effects of soy tariffs on change in Republican vote share between the 2016 and 2018 election. March 11, 2019. Posted with permission. </p

Addressing Endogeneity in Actor-Speci fi c Network Measures

The study of international relations (IR), and political science more broadly, has derived great benefits from the recent growth of conceptualizing and modeling political phenomena within their broader network contexts. More than just a novel approach to evaluating the old puzzles, network analysis provides a whole new way of theoretical thinking. Challenging the traditional dyad-driven approach to the study of IR, networks highlight actor interdependence that goes beyond dyads and emphasizes that many traditional IR variables, such as conflict, trade, alliances, or international organization memberships must be treated and studied as networks. Properties of these networks (e.g., polarization, density), and of actor positions within them (e.g., similarity, centrality), will then reveal important insights about international events. Network analysis, however, is not yet fully adapted to account for important methodological issues common to IR research, specifically the issue of endogeneity or possible nonindependence between actors’ position within international networks and the outcomes of interest: e.g. alliance network may be nonindependent from the conflict or trade network. We adopt an instrumental variables approach to explore and address the issue of endogeneity in network context. We illustrate the issue and the advantages of our approach with Monte Carlo analysis, as well as with several empirical examples from IR literature.This is a manuscript of an article from Political Science Research and Methods 4 (2016): 123, doi:10.1017/psrm.2015.34. Posted with permission.</p