Elections And War: The Electoral Incentive In The Democratic Politics Of War And Peace

xii,208 hal,;18 c

A Survivor′s Guide to R: An Introduction for the Uninitiated and the Unnerved

Focusing on developing practical R skills rather than teaching pure statistics, Dr. Kurt Taylor Gaubatz’s A Survivor’s Guide to R provides a gentle yet thorough introduction to R. The book is structured around critical R tasks, and focuses on applied knowledge, rather than abstract concepts. Gaubatz’s easy-to-read approach helps students with little or no background in statistics or programming to develop real-world R skills through straightforward coverage of R objects and functions. Focusing on real-world data, the challenges of dataset construction, and the use of R’s powerful graphing tools, the guide is written in an accessible, sympathetic, even humorous style that ensures students acquire functional R skills they can use in their own projects and carry into their work beyond the classroom. [From Amazon.com]https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/politicalscience_geography_books/1036/thumbnail.jp

How International is \u27International\u27 Law?

The international legal community posits universality as a central characteristic of modern international law. But there has been little work to assess the degree to which international legal norms are widely shared and incorporated into the foreign policy-making of states. Previous work in this area has attempted to describe the distribution of legal values across cultures. This work has proven contradictory and inconclusive. The epistemic communities literature suggests looking at the distribution of practitioners as an alternative approach for assessing the diffusion of norms and practices. In fact, the community of litigators who practice before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) comes from a very small set of Western states. While Western states utilize their own staff lawyers when appearing before the ICJ, non-Western states hire Western lawyers. International lawyers often identify the ICJ as the premier institution of public international law. The failure of non-Western states to produce their own lawyers for use at the ICJ raises significant questions about their resources and motivation to incorporate international law into their foreign policy-making. By these measures, international law is not as \u27international\u27 as its name implies

Reducing Uncertainty: Information Analysis for Comparative Case Studies

The increasing integration of qualitative and quantitative analysis has largely focused on the benefits of in-depth case studies for enhancing our understanding of statistical results. This article goes in the other direction to show how some very straightforward quantitative methods drawn from information theory can strengthen comparative case studies. Using several prominent “structured, focused comparison” studies, we apply the information-theoretic approach to further advance these studies' findings by providing systematic, comparable, and replicable measures of uncertainty and influence for the factors they identified. The proposed analytic tools are simple enough to be used by a wide range of scholars to enhance comparative case study findings and ensure the maximum leverage for discerning between alternative explanations as well as cumulating knowledge from multiple studies. Our approach especially serves qualitative policy-relevant case comparisons in international studies, which have typically avoided more complex or less applicable quantitative tools

Political Groups, Coordination Costs and Credible Communication in the Shadow of Power

Across subfields of political science, groups in subordinate power positions often have incentives to feign satisfaction with the status quo, in order to avoid punishment from more powerful actors. Consequently, subordinate actors' cooperative public discourse is widely considered non-credible 'cheap talk.' In contrast, we argue that for dissatisfied groups, misrepresenting preferences through cooperative public discourse involves significant costs and risks. To minimize the risk that proscribed goals will be discovered, subordinate actors must restrict even private discourse. Yet political groups and organizations rely on internal communication to achieve the intragroup coordination necessary to develop and implement policies. Refraining from proscribed discourse therefore constitutes a costly signal that carries some degree of credibility. Our argument has broad implications both for signaling theories and for the empirical measurement of actors' preferences, which generalize across subfields of political science. These implications are illustrated by empirical applications to U.S. foreign policymaking, China's international relations, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions

Things Unspoken: Forbidden Discourse and Credible Signals in the Shadow of Power

Political Science Quarterl