Beyond zeroes and ones: the severity and evolution of civil conflict

We assess risk factors affecting the severity and dynamics of civil wars, departing from analyses focused primarily on static models of the effect of income on the extensive margin of conflict. Civil conflicts are shown to be persistent, but rarely do they become more severe in response to past fighting. Substantial heterogeneity in the speed of mean reversion is documented: severe fighting lasts longest in poor countries and ethnically fractionalized countries

No Child Left Behind’s school performance metrics may bepunishing disadvantaged school districts and students

In 2001, Congress enacted the No Child Left Behind Act, with the aims of improving student’s academic achievement and closing the achievement gap between high and low achieving students. In new research, Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu and Zachary Peskowitz assess the impact of the measure’s school and district performance metrics. They find that changes in the measure’s ‘adequate yearly progress’ metric meant that disadvantaged schools districts which had actually seen improvements in student achievement were less likely to pass a school tax levy, starving these districts of the resources needed to educate low achieving students

Dynamics of the New American Majority, 2010-2030: An Initial Look at Population Size, Growth, and Electoral Participation

In the past year, VPC and CVI commissioned a team of social science researchers to size the gaps and opportunities in voter turnout and registration of the New American Majority, which includes people of color, young people, and unmarried women. The research team included Professor Bernard L. Fraga, Professor Zachary Peskowitz, and Caitlin Gilbert. They have provided impressive data and analysis underscoring the importance of VPC and CVI's work to engage the New American Majority (NAM) in democracy in equal proportion to their presence in society through voter registration, mobilization, and education.

Mummy blogs and representations of motherhood:“Bad mummies” and their readers

Digital technologies have opened up new environments in which the experiences of motherhood and mothering are narrated and negotiated. Studies of “mummy blogs” have explored the ways in which blogs, as social media networks, can provide solace, support, and social capital for mothers. However, research has not addressed how mothers, as readers of blogs, use the mamasphere as a cultural site through which the identities and role of motherhood, and the mother–child relationship, are socially and digitally (re)constructed. This article focuses on confessional blogging of the “bad” or “slummy” mummy: blogs that share stories of boredom, frustration, and maternal deficiency while relishing the subversive status of the “bad” mummy. Drawing on understandings of social media as a space of social surveillance and networked publics, the article argues that in framing narratives of motherhood in terms of parental failure and a desperation for gin, “bad mummy” blogs collapse social contexts in important and interesting ways. Using an example of a conflict between two mummy bloggers, the article will reflect on the ways in which the digital terrain of motherhood can both liberate and constrain: a space for mothers to express and share frustrations and seek solidarity, a space of public condemnation and judgment, and a space that poses ethical issues in the digital curation of family life

Spinning fantasies: rabbis, gender, and history

Miriam Peskowitz offers a dramatic revision to our understanding of early rabbinic Judaism. Using a wide range of sources - archaeology, legal texts, grave goods, technology, art, and writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin - she challenges traditional assumptions regarding Judaism's historical development.Following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Roman armies in 70 C.E., new incarnations of Judaism emerged. Of these, rabbinic Judaism was the most successful, becoming the classical form of the religion. Through ancient stories involving Jewish spinners and weavers, Peskowitz re-examines this critical moment in Jewish history and presents a feminist interpretation in which gender takes center stage. She shows how notions of female and male were developed by the rabbis of Roman Palestine and why the distinctions were so important in the formation of their religious and legal tradition.Rabbinic attention to women, men, sexuality, and gender took place within the "ordinary tedium of everyday life, in acts that were both familiar and mundane." While spinners and weavers performed what seemed like ordinary tasks, their craft was in fact symbolic of larger gender and sexual issues, which Peskowitz deftly explicates. Her study of ancient spinning and her abundant source material will set new standards in the fields of gender studies, Jewish studies, and cultural studies

Replication Data for: Ideological Signaling and Incumbency Advantage

Replication data and code for "Ideological Signaling and Incumbency Advantage

Replication Data for: Agency Problems in Political Campaigns: Media Buying and Consulting

Advertising expenditures in congressional campaigns are made not directly by campaigns themselves but indirectly though intermediary firms. Using a new dataset of revenues and costs of these firms, we study the markups that these firms charge candidates. We find that markups are higher for inexperienced candidates relative to experienced candidates, and PACs relative to candidates. We also find significant differences across the major parties: firms working for Republicans charge higher prices, exert less effort, and induce less responsiveness in their clients' advertising expenditures to electoral circumstances than do their Democratic counterparts. We connect this observation to the distribution of ideology among individual consulting firm employees, arguing that these higher rents incentivize consultants to work against their intrinsic ideological motivations. The internal organization of firms reflects an attempt to mitigate this conflict of interest; firms are composed of ideologically homogeneous employees, and are more likely to work for ideologically proximate clients

Measuring Preference Intensity: An Investigation into the Sensitivity of Quadratic Voting for Survey Research

Recent studies have shown promising evidence in favor of quadratic voting for survey research (QVSR) as a measure of preference intensity. One important question, however, remains unaddressed: is preference intensity toward policy proposals, as measured by using QVSR, sensitive to changes in policy bundles? To fill this gap, we design a survey experiment in which we randomly assign 5 of 10 state-level policies to each respondent. We then follow the standard protocol of QVSR by allocating virtual voting credits to respondents, who use these credits to buy votes in favor of or against each policy proposal, with the price of each vote increasing quadratically. This experimental manipulation allows us to examine whether the levels of preference intensity, as measured by the vote count of each policy, are sensitive to the inclusion of other policy proposals. We also examine whether respondents are less likely to pick a side (or, put differently, more likely to express non-opinions) under QVSR, as compared to conventional Likert items. The findings will complement existing research that mostly focuses on demonstrating how QVSR discourages respondents from expressing extreme preferences. Lastly, we ask respondents which of the 5 state-level policies is most important to them. If our analysis shows that the policy that a respondent views as most important is also the policy that he or she casts the highest number of votes on, then our study will help to bolster the face validity of QVSR