Search results

One of the major issues in predicting state failure is the relatively rare occurrence of event onset. This class skew problem can cause difficulties in both estimating a model and selecting a decision boundary. Since the publication of King & Zeng's studies in 2001, scholars have utilized case-control methods to address this issue. This article builds on the landmark research of the Political Instability Task Force comparing the case-control approach to several other methods from the machine learning field and some original to this study. Case-control methods have several practical disadvantages and show no measurable advantages in prediction. The article also introduces cost-sensitive methods for determining a decision boundary. This explication raises questions about the Task Force's formulation of a decision boundary and suggests methods for making useful predictions for policy. I find that the decision boundary chosen by the PITF implicitly assumes that the cost of intervention is about 7.7% of the cost of non-intervention when state failure will take place. These findings demonstrate that there is still much work to be done in predicting state failure, especially in limiting the number of false positives. More generally, it suggests caution in using accuracy as a measure of success when significant class imbalance exists in the data.

This study sets forth a social identity explanation of the link between supranational identity and democratic values, and, thus, for cross-border value diffusion. This explanation is tested with data from 19 regions in Europe from the latest wave of the World Values Survey using multilevel ordered logit models. The results reveal a little-studied relationship between the supranational identification of respondents within the European framework and stronger support for the postmaterialist values that have been previously linked to successful democratization. Conversely, stronger national and local identification is associated with weaker support for these values. The use of multilevel methods also reveals several interesting patterns in more traditional explanations of the adoption of democratic values. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

This study sets forth a social identity explanation of the link between supranational identity and democratic values, and, thus, for cross-border value diffusion. This explanation is tested with data from 19 regions in Europe from the latest wave of the World Values Survey using multilevel ordered logit models. The results reveal a little-studied relationship between the supranational identification of respondents within the European framework and stronger support for the postmaterialist values that have been previously linked to successful democratization. Conversely, stronger national and local identification is associated with weaker support for these values. The use of multilevel methods also reveals several interesting patterns in more traditional explanations of the adoption of democratic values.