Researchers frequently face applied situations where their measurement of a binary outcome suffers from bias. Social desirability bias in survey work is the most widely appreciated circumstance, but the strategic incentives of human beings similarly induce bias in many measures outside of survey...

A growing body of applied research on political violence employs split-population models to address problems of zero inflation in conflict event counts and related binary dependent variables. Nevertheless, conflict researchers typically use standard ordered probit models to study discrete...

The Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project uses content analysis to measure a number of variables on more than 15,000 public allegations of government ill-treatment and torture made by Amnesty International (AI) from 1995 to 2005. The ITT specific allegation (SA) event data use...

This study examines how the politics of coalition government formation affect foreign exchange markets in Western European parliamentary democracies. Existing studies suggest that ex ante uncertainty associated with formation of coalition governments increases exchange rate volatility. We...

The events of Abu Ghraib exposed politicians, journalists, military and law enforcement personnel, NGOs, activists and ordinary citizens to the potential brutality of state repression. Many were left stunned that the agents of a liberal democracy would perpetrate such horrific acts against...

This study examines how coalition governments affect the size of government, measured by total central government expenditure as a share of GDP. Existing studies suggest that multiparty governments spend more because they have a larger number of parties, greater ideological fragmentation, and...

This study investigates the circumstances that lead some countries to produce a large number of refugees and relatively few internally displaced persons (IDPs) as opposed to a large number of IDPs and relatively few refugees. We develop the hypothesis that refugee flows are greater in the face...

Although scholars have made considerable progress on a number of important research questions by relaxing assumptions commonly used to divide political science into subfields, rigid boundaries remain in some contexts. In this essay, we suggest that the assumption that international politics is...