We account for competition for export markets among donor countries of foreign aid by analyzing spatial dependence in aid allocation. Employing sector-specific aid data, we find that the five largest donors react to aid giving by other donors with whom they compete in terms of exporting goods...

Background: Reports from the UK and the USA suggest that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) predominantly affects poorer neighbourhoods. This article paints a more complex picture by distinguishing between a first and second phase of the pandemic. The initial spread of infections and its...

Infectious diseases generate spatial dependence or contagion not only between individuals but also between geographical units. New infections in one local district do not just depend on properties of the district, but also on the strength of social ties of its population with populations in...

The recent surge in studies analyzing spatial dependence in political science has gone hand in hand with increased attention paid to the choice of estimation technique. In comparison, specification choice has been relatively neglected, even though it leads to equally, if not more, serious...

Political units often spatially depend in their policy choices on other units. This also holds in dyadic settings where, as in much of international relations research, the focus of the analysis is the pair or dyad of two political units. Yet, with few exceptions, social scientists have analyzed...

Famine mortality is preventable by government action and yet some famines kill. We develop a political theory of famine mortality based on the selectorate theory of Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2002, 2003). We argue that it can be politically rational for a government, democratic or not, to remain...

The polity2 variable from the Polity IV project is the most popular measure of a country’s political regime. This article contends that the coding rules employed to create a polity2 score during years of so-called interregnum and affected transitions produce a measure of democracy that lacks...

An emerging "clash of civilizations" should reveal itself in patterns of international terror¬ism. Huntington himself explicitly refers to terrorism in the conflict between specific civilizations, and particularly so in the clash between the Islamic civilization and the West. We confront his...

Famine mortality is preventable by government action and yet some famines kill. We develop a political theory of famine mortality based on the selectorate theory of Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2002, 2003). We argue that it can be politically rational for a government, democratic or not, to remain...

Robustness tests, which study the frailty of estimates to plausible changes in the specification of empirical models, have become an accepted analytical instrument in quantitative analyses. Surprisingly, however, scholars hardly ever define what they mean by ‘robustness’ and do not agree on...