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Leadership Targeting and Perverse Incentives
Enrique Pena Nieto with supporters. Photograph: Daniel Aguilar/Getty Images If targeting of Drug Trafficking Organization (DTO) leaders in Mexico has contributed to high levels of violence, as I argue...
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The German Tank Problem
Restored Panther tank recovered from a Polish swamp. Private collection of the late Jacques Littlefield, Portola Valley CA. A few weeks ago I was talking with Kieran Healy about the impact the Second...
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Hackers vs. Diplomats
XKCD’s Map of the Internet, 2006 Katherine Maher’s Foreign Policy piece got a lot of (deserved) attention last week. If the topic interests you, go read the whole thing. I’ll highlight the parts that...
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Grad Student Advice Round-Up
Nearly two years into my graduate school experience, I now feel qualified to write this post–especially since it is an aggregation of others’ experiences and recommendations. This is by no means all...
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The Randomness of Borders
Fifty US States Redrawn with Equal Population Rivers and oceans help to form natural boundaries, but if it’s a straight line you can bet that it’s essentially random–and it might even be in the wrong...
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Kurds and Statelessness
Kurdish peshmerga–literally “those who face death”–standing guard at Shenarwe Mountain Last week one of my academic heroes, James C. Scott, came to Duke to give two talks. The first was a lunchtime...
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Communication Technology and Politics
Cell phone coverage (black) and conflict locations (grey) in Africa (Pierskalla and Hollenbach, 2013: Fig. 1) We have been on a technology kick this week, first talking about modern etiquette and then...
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Blogging, Two Years On
Tuesday marked the second anniversary of YSPR. I wrote the first post while at a political science conference, so it seems fitting that I spent the last couple of weeks travelling to ISA and MPSA. From...
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Risk, Overreaction, and Control
How many people died because of the September 11 attacks? The answer depends on what you are trying to measure. The official estimate is around 3,000 deaths as a direct result of hijacked aircraft and...
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Mapping Literal Place Names
Place names are another one of those micro-institutions. They often carry a linguistic legacy indicating some important discoverer, inhabitant, or conqueror. Changes in place names are significant too....
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Currency and Conflict
According to Lebanon’s Daily Star: Traders across Syria reported widely fluctuating rates and two currency dealers in Damascus, where the pound appeared to be hit hardest, said it fell below 200 to the...
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Podcasts I Like
Apologies for the silence here lately. I have been working on a couple of longer-than-average posts, as well as some fun projects that I will hopefully be able to share with you here soon. Part of the...
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Visualizing Political Unrest in Egypt, Syria, and Turkey
The lab of Michael D. Ward et al now has a blog. The inaugural post describes some of the lab’s ongoing projects that may come up in future entries including modeling of protests, insurgencies, and...
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Political Forecasting and the Use of Baseline Rates
As Joe Blitzstein likes to say, “Thinking conditionally is a condition for thinking.” Humans are not naturally good at this skill. Consider the following example: Kelly is interested in books and...
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Constitutional Forks Revisited
Around this time last year, we discussed the idea of a constitutional “fork” that occurred with the founding of the Confederate States of America. That post briefly explains how forks work in open...
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