Search results

IntroductionIn recent years, the availability of online source material and
online papers has increased instructors' concerns regarding
plagiarism in the classroom. Many instructors do not realize,
however, that the digital revolution has also created a niche for
fast and (at least somewhat) reliable plagiarism-detection
software.

In this experiment in an introductory political science course at the U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, one session of 90 students was warned not to plagiarize when writing an essay about recent events, while the other session was not. Student essays were run through the Essay Verification Engine (EVE) three times & problematic papers were reviewed with other sources. Plagiarism was present in about 12.5% of essays in both sessions. Results were revealed to the session prior to the second round of essays, also reviewed using EVE. Only one student was found to plagiarize in the second round. It is concluded that blatant plagiarism is not as pervasive as thought, but casual plagiarism occurs often. Advertising the use of plagiarism-detection devices, even if not completely reliable, is a boon in curtailing plagiarism. 1 Figure, 4 References. M. Pflum

Increased scholarly focus on climate variability and its implications has given rise to a substantial literature on the relationship between climate-induced food insecurity and violent conflict. In this article, we theorize this relationship as contingent on the institutional and structural vulnerability of the state. States' institutional and structural capabilities and constraints – such as the strength of the agricultural sector and domestic regime type – influence the probability that climate-induced food insecurity will translate into conflict, because they determine the degree to which countries are able to successfully address insecurity. We estimate the effect of food insecurity and state vulnerability on the occurrence of violent uprisings in Africa for the years 1991–2011. We find that these effects are interactive, with state vulnerability moderating the impact of food insecurity on the likelihood of violence. We also find that capable governance is an even better guarantor of peace than good weather. We conclude that a two-pronged approach that both combats the impact of climate variability on food insecurity and strengthens government institutions would be a much more effective strategy for preventing violent uprisings than either policy would be in isolation.

This article presents a conceptual clarification of asymmetric hypotheses and a discussion of methodologies available to test them. Despite the existence of a litany of theories that posit asymmetric hypotheses, most empirical studies fail to capture their core insight: boundaries separating zones of data from areas that lack data are substantively interesting. We discuss existing set-theoretic and large-N approaches to the study of asymmetric hypotheses, introduce new ones from the literatures on stochastic frontier and data envelopment analysis, evaluate their relative merits, and give three examples of how asymmetric hypotheses can be studied with this suite of tools.

Measuring the causal impact of state behavior on outcomes is one of the biggest methodological challenges in the field of political science, for two reasons: behavior is generally endogenous, and the threat of unobserved variables that confound the relationship between behavior and outcomes is pervasive. Matching methods, widely considered to be the state of the art in causal inference in political science, are generally ill-suited to inference in the presence of unobserved confounders. Heckman-style multiple-equation models offer a solution to this problem; however, they rely on functional-form assumptions that can produce substantial bias in estimates of average treatment effects. We describe a category of models, flexible joint likelihood models, that account for both features of the data while avoiding reliance on rigid functional-form assumptions. We then assess these models' performance in a series of neutral simulations, in which they produce substantial (55% to ${>}$90%) reduction in bias relative to competing models. Finally, we demonstrate their utility in a reanalysis of Simmons' (2000) classic study of the impact of Article VIII commitment on compliance with the IMF's currency-restriction regime.

Symposium: Theory, History, and The Global Transformation. - Theory, history, and great transformations / Christian Reus-Smit 422-435. - The Global Transformation: more than meets the eye / Paul Musgrave, Daniel Nexon 436-447. - International historical what? / Patricia Owens 448-457. - The promise of historical dynamism for the American study of international relations / Bear Braumoeller 458-467. - History, theory, and contingency in the study of modern international relations: The Global Transformation revisited / Alexander Anievas 468-480. - The Global Transformation, multiple early modernities, and international systems change / Andrew Phillips 481-491. - How to remedy Eurocentrism in IR? A complement and a challenge for The Global Transformation / Pinar Bilgin 492-501. - Theory, history, and The Global Transformation / Barry Buzan, George Lawson 502-522

AbstractScholars have written extensively about hierarchical international order, on the one hand, and war on the other, but surprisingly little work systematically explores the connection between the two. This disconnect is all the more striking given that empirical studies have found a strong relationship between the two. We provide a generative computational network model that explains hierarchy and war as two elements of a larger recursive process: The threat of war drives the formation of hierarchy, which in turn shapes states' incentives for war. Grounded in canonical theories of hierarchy and war, the model explains an array of known regularities about hierarchical order and conflict. Surprisingly, we also find that many traditional results of the international relations literature—including institutional persistence, balancing behavior, and systemic self‐regulation—emerge from the interplay between hierarchy and war.