Suchergebnisse

This article introduces {peacesciencer}, an R package that contains a litany of tools for creating data of widespread interest to the peace science community. The package is cross-platform, assuming only a somewhat recent installation of the R programming language with some of the enhanced functionality of the broadly popular {tidvyerse} packages. Peace science researchers can use this package to greatly reduce the time needed to perfectly recreate common types of data from scratch and to merge in ubiquitous indicators included in almost every analysis (e.g. democracy data, contiguity data). The software is freely available on CRAN and maintains an active website documenting its features at http://svmiller.com/peacesciencer.

Multiple scholars have shown that external territorial threat, conceptually the level of concern for a state that its territorial integrity is subject to violent conflict and imposed contraction by other states, has major implications for the state's domestic political environment. However, the strand of scholarship that agrees on the domestic political effects of external territorial threat disagrees on how to code this important concept. These works either rely on binary indicators that do a poor job communicating "increasing" or "decreasing" territorial threat or use dyad-year indicators of conflict propensities as a stand-in for a state-year-level observation. I use this research note to offer an empirical measurement of state-year external territorial threat from a Bayesian random item response model for all states from 1816 to 2010. I assess the face validity and construct validity of the data these models generate, all of which suggest the measure does well to capture the concept in question. I close with a statement of the availability of the data and their potential applications.

ObjectiveGun control is a classic case of policy gridlock and we commonly assume public opinion is at the foundation of this gridlock. However, public opinion analyses of attitudes about gun control often say little about the topic itself and do not fully leverage our long‐running survey data to assess partisan, regional, and temporal trends in attitudes toward gun control.MethodsI use over 26 waves of General Social Survey data from 1972 to 2016 to analyze the main public opinion cleavages (partisanship, urban/rural distinctions, and Census regions) of gun control.ResultsI find that partisanship and ruralness are not robust predictors of attitudes about gun control and that partisan polarization is only partial and recent. Further assumptions about regional variation in attitudes toward gun control need reevaluation.ConclusionGun control policy gridlock says more about polarization at the elite level than at the mass level. Future research can also do well to assess issue‐linkage concerns on specific gun control policy measures.

AbstractWhat makes individuals tolerate government corruption? Can citizens tolerate government corruption but be intolerant of corrupt behavior in society? I argue not all attitudes toward corruption are the same. External territorial threats elicit a tolerance of government corruption since citizens allow for government corruption when they are concerned for their security. However, citizens become intolerant of corruption in society because they view this as maximizing individual welfare at the expense of the common good (i.e. security). Using data from three unique cross-national surveys, I find that citizens under territorial threat are less likely to think corruption is an important problem, are more likely to tolerate government corruption, but are less likely to tolerate corruption by private citizens.

Independent judiciaries prevent democratic reversals, facilitate peaceful transitions of power, and legitimate democracy among citizens. We believe this judicial independence is important for citizen-level judicial confidence and faith in democratic institutions. I challenge this and argue that citizens living under terror threats lose confidence in their independent judiciaries. Terror threats lead citizens to enable the state leader to provide counterterrorism for their security, which has important implications for interbranch relations between the executive and the judiciary. Citizens lose confidence in independent judiciaries that provide due process for suspected terrorists. I test my argument with mixed effects models that incorporate the Global Terrorism Database and four waves of European Values Survey. The analyses demonstrate the negative effects of terror threats on judicial confidence when interacting terror threats with measures of judicial independence. My findings have important implications for the study of democratic confidence and the liberty-security dilemma.

What makes individuals likely to support state leaders with few constraints on executive authority? Leaders who reorganize power around their position seem inimical to most individuals' welfare. Yet in many countries these leaders receive broad popular support when citizens feel some type of threat. This study argues that territorial threat leads individuals to support this type of state leadership. Mobilization of the military for defense of territory requires discretion by the state leader, leading individuals to interpret checks and balances as obstacles to security. The results using mixed effects logit analyses show a robust connection between territorial threat and individual-level expectations of the state leader. Individuals who live in states under territorial threat are more likely to prefer a state leader unconstrained by legislative process or other checks and balances. The analyses provided in this study have important implications for the study of popular support of democracy.

What makes individuals likely to support state leaders with few constraints on executive authority? Leaders who reorganize power around their position seem inimical to most individuals' welfare. Yet in many countries these leaders receive broad popular support when citizens feel some type of threat. This study argues that territorial threat leads individuals to support this type of state leadership. Mobilization of the military for defense of territory requires discretion by the state leader, leading individuals to interpret checks and balances as obstacles to security. The results using mixed effects logit analyses show a robust connection between territorial threat and individual-level expectations of the state leader. Individuals who live in states under territorial threat are more likely to prefer a state leader unconstrained by legislative process or other checks and balances. The analyses provided in this study have important implications for the study of popular support of democracy.

Multiple studies argue that the division of territory between states is a root cause of war in the international system. This is often understood as a function of the unique importance of territory at the level of the individual citizen, because the territory itself directly affects an individual's well-being on multiple dimensions. As such, disputes over territory should also have consequences for an individual's overall subjective appraisal of their well-being. This article argues that disputes over the allocation of territory between states do affect an individual's subjective well-being, but not uniformly. Citizens in states routinely targeted by a territorial threat from a revisionist neighbor are generally unhappy. However, citizens in states that initiate territorial disputes are happier as a result of the aggressive foreign policy of the state leader to secure the coveted territorial good. This is first demonstrated using mixed effects modeling on data drawn from the World Values Survey and Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute dataset. In addition, this article provides an illustration of variations in territorial threat and subjective well-being using the case of Nigeria, finding that Nigerians were happier when their state was initiating territorial threat against its neighbors and less happy during a period when Nigeria itself was the target of territorial threat. The analyses provided advance the territorial conflict research program by measuring the individual-level effects of territorial disputes. In addition, the findings add to a growing scholarship on the political determinants of an individual quality of life, sometimes considered the 'ultimate dependent variable' in social science.

We use this article to introduce the Militarized Interstate Confrontation (MIC) dataset, 1816-2014—a new dataset for international conflict with a host of innovative features. The MIC data corrects thousands of errors in existing interstate conflict data and provides fatality ranges for all conflicts, with meaningful fatality estimates and no missing fatality values. Thus, the MIC data fixes missing data problems that have precluded researchers from analyzing escalation and related issues because of the lack of integrated conflict and war data. We also identify and distribute separate datasets for state-versus-citizen actions that are protest-dependent. These are attacks on shipping, fishing boats, and rebels, which were previously included in the data because the sovereign of those private citizens protested. We discuss our systematic search for new conflict cases and the 108 new conflicts we found, and we provide analyses and summaries that demonstrate the usefulness of our MIC data. Finally, we use our new data to create the first ever dataset of truly dyadic, directed dyad-year data, with highest actions and fatalities that vary appropriately within conflicts by both year and dyad. We believe these datasets will be useful for a host of studies but especially those interested in how conflicts evolve over time.