A few days ago, Sean Langberg blogged about a subject that’s long been a pet peeve of mine: how we classify countries when we try to talk about the international system, and the labels we apply to the resulting groups. I thought I’d take the cue to air my grievances on the topic and make [...]
All posts by dartthrowingchimp
There Are Two Kinds of Countries in the World: _____ and _____
Posted by dartthrowingchimp on May 25, 2012
http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/there-are-two-kinds-of-countries-in-the-world-_____-and-_____/
Assessing the Risks of Risk Assessment
Tuesday’s Washington Post reports that a U.S. government task force now recommends “men should no longer receive a routine blood test to check for prostate cancer because the test does more harm than good.” After reviewing the available scientific evidence, the task force concluded that such testing will help save the life of just one in 1,000 [...]
Posted by dartthrowingchimp on May 24, 2012
http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/assessing-the-risks-of-risk-assessment/
Assessing and Improving Expert Forecasts
What follows is a guest post by Kelsey Woerner, a soon-to-graduate senior at Dartmouth College double-majoring in government and psychology. She completed the research described below as part of her senior honors thesis in Dartmouth’s Department of Government under the guidance of her advisor (and my colleague), Ben Valentino. Her thesis is a terrific piece [...]
Posted by dartthrowingchimp on May 21, 2012
http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/assessing-and-improving-expert-forecasts/
Which Past Will the Future Resemble?
Forecasts derived from statistical models depend on the assumption that the future will resemble the past. For modelers, the question is: which past? The time frame(s) we choose to use when developing our models and the ways we deal with history and time in our analyses can have substantial effects on the forecasts we produce, [...]
Posted by dartthrowingchimp on May 16, 2012
http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/which-past-will-the-future-resemble/
House Votes to Defund Political Science Program: The Irony, It Burns
From the Monkey Cage this morning: The Flake amendment Henry wrote about appears to have passed the House last night with a 218-208 vote. The amendment prohibits funding for NSF’s political science program, which among others funds many valuable data collection efforts including the National Election Studies. No other program was singled out like this…This is obviously not the last word on [...]
Posted by dartthrowingchimp on May 10, 2012
http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/house-votes-to-defund-political-science-program-the-irony-it-burns/
Statistics Is Not Alchemy
Are aid and investment from China driving crackdowns on the press in some parts of Africa? I don’t know. That’s unsatisfying and maybe even a little annoying, but I’m writing a post about it anyway because why I don’t know says a lot about how hard it is to do good quantitative social science, even in the [...]
Posted by dartthrowingchimp on May 8, 2012
http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/statistics-is-not-alchemy/
Can International Election Monitoring Harm Governance? Actually, Yeah
According to a convincing new paper (ungated version here) by political scientists Alberto Simpser and Daniela Donno, the answer is a definite yes. As election monitoring has increased, governments intent on cheating have learned to strategically adapt, relying less on election-day fraud, and instead increasing their use of pre-election manipulation that is less likely to be criticized [...]
Posted by dartthrowingchimp on May 2, 2012
http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/can-international-election-monitoring-harm-governance-actually-yeah/
The WTO as Catalyst of Democratization
In a statistical analysis written up a few years ago in the journal Democratization, I found that countries belonging to the World Trade Organization (WTO) or its predecessor, the GATT, were more likely to attempt and sustain democratic government than ones that did not. By contrast, I found no such “boost” from participation in global or regional [...]
Posted by dartthrowingchimp on May 1, 2012
http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/the-wto-as-catalyst-of-democratization/
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