Researchers frequently face applied situations where their measurement of a binary outcome suffers from bias. Social desirability bias in survey work is the most widely appreciated circumstance, but the strategic incentives of human beings similarly induce bias in many measures outside of survey...

The events of Abu Ghraib exposed politicians, journalists, military and law enforcement personnel, NGOs, activists and ordinary citizens to the potential brutality of state repression. Many were left stunned that the agents of a liberal democracy would perpetrate such horrific acts against...

Private information characteristics like resolve and audience costs are powerful influences over strategic international behavior, especially crisis bargaining. As a consequence, states face asymmetric information when interacting with one another and will presumably try to learn about each...

This study examines how coalition governments affect the size of government, measured by total central government expenditure as a share of GDP. Existing studies suggest that multiparty governments spend more because they have a larger number of parties, greater ideological fragmentation, and...

This study investigates the circumstances that lead some countries to produce a large number of refugees and relatively few internally displaced persons (IDPs) as opposed to a large number of IDPs and relatively few refugees. We develop the hypothesis that refugee flows are greater in the face...

Why would people abandon their homes in favor of an uncertain life elsewhere? The short answer, of course, is violence. More specifically, we contend that people monitor the violent behavior of both the government and dissidents and assess the threat such behavior poses to their lives, physical...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to assess the ability of a theoretically motivated statistical model to accurately forecast annual, national counts of terror attacks out-of-sample. Methodology/approach Bayesian multi-level models, classification analysis, marginal calibration plots Findings...