The Quantitative Peace

Links Galore

It's been a while since my last post, so I thought it was time to put up at least a little something:

Senate Republicans are, for the moment, blocking Chuck Hagel's nomination as Defense Secretary. Admittedly, my attention to current events has been spotty over the past couple of months, but it seems that every time I turn my attention back to this the basic rationale for opposing Hagel has changed. Initially it concerned his comments regarding Israel, then it morphed to include a means of obtaining more information about the attacks on Benghazi, and now it seems to have evolved further to include concerns over compensation Hagel received for giving some speeches since he left the Senate. Ultimately I guess I remain unsure as to how this works out for the better for Republicans—now, or in the long run. 

A meteor injured several hundred people in Russia. 

Spencer Ackerman has a piece up at Wired looking at the mistakes made by the Galactic Empire at the Battle of Hoth. There is also a broader set of responses to Ackerman's piece at Wired, and the folks at the Duck of Minerva have several followup posts debating the shortcomings of the Empire in a wider context. Itemize these posts, I will:

1. Here's Ackerman's post.
2. Wired's symposium.
3. Dan Nexon's piece for said Wired symposium.
4. Patrick Thaddeus Jackon's piece at the Duck.
5. Robert Kelly's piece at the Duck.
6. Steve Saideman piece at the Duck.
7. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson's followup at the Duck.

As these discussions have mirrored some of the lunchtime discussions I've had over the past few years with fellow bloggers Chad Clay and Michael Allen, I've enjoyed reading them immensely. I will try to update this list if there are any new additions.

 

 

Chuck Hagel and Bipartisanship in Foreign Policy

The news surrounding Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel and John Brennan as Secretary of Defense and Director of the CIA (respectively) has primarily been focused on the "controversial" Hagel's previous statements and positions. Republican commentators have been complaining about Hagel's nomination, claiming that his nomination sends a powerful signal that the Obama administration is putting more "daylight" between the US and Israel, among other things. Steve Clemmons at The Atlantic has also reviewed several arguments for and against Hagel's nomination. The turf on that subject has already been covered pretty thoroughly, so I'll leave the issue be for now. What has received less attention, however, is that Hagel's nomination represents a continuation of a fairly long history of Democrats appointing Republicans to positions within the foreign policy bureaucracy. 

In 1940 FDR appointed Henry Stimson and Frank Knox—both Republicans—to be his Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy (again, respectively). Stimson's appointment in particular is generally regarded as marking the onset of the bipartisan consensus that characterized the early Cold War period. Having previously served as Secretary of State under President Hoover and Secretary of War under Taft, Stimson was already a widely recognized figure in the foreign policymaking community (such as it was back then). Along with Stimson came John McCloy and Robert Lovett, both of whom were also Republicans and both of whom served as Stimson's assistants in the War Department.

By bringing these Republicans into his administration, Roosevelt was attempting to build support among opposition Republicans for increasing US activism in World War II. Primarily this encompassed moderate internationalist Republicans from the Northeast. Even prior to his nomination, Stimson and his mentor, Elihu Root, himself previously a Secretary of War and Secretary of State, had petitioned Congressional leadership to introduce some form of draft bill to prepare the US for involvement in the growing conflicts in Europe and East Asia. Stimson and Root had both been devout internationalists in the years leading up to the Second World War, and their appointment marked what many historians have labeled as the beginning of the "Eastern Establishment" in foreign policymaking. The Establishment narrative, broadly speaking, tends to emphasize bipartisanship in the foreign policy bureaucracy specifically, but it also encompasses themes of elite influence, economic interests, and political polarization in foreign policymaking.

This general narrative has been present for several decades in the US foreign policy literature, but it's largely been isolated to the qualitative political science and historical literatures. Quantitative political science research has delved into the more narrow issue of bipartisanship, but these studies have tended to focus on Congress. Accordingly, the central focus of this large body of work has gone unexamined in a systematic sense, and part of my dissertation research has attempted to address this gap. This is really all a long-winded way of saying that the Hagel nomination provides me with a timely opportunity to briefly share some of my work on the subject. Though I don't want to give away the farm here, this seems like a fine time to chime in. 

Despite the recognition that the foreign policy bureaucracy—indeed, the bureaucracy more broadly—plays a fairly prominent role in the policymaking process, we don't really have much in the way of systematic quantitative research on the subject. I've tried to get at some of these issues in my dissertation by collecting some new data on appointees to foreign policymaking positions within the foreign policy bureaucracy. I primarily focus on the State Department and the Defense Department, but I also focus on some other agencies like the CIA. In total, I've collected data on some 1,000+ individuals serving in these posts from 1948 through the present. One of the primary characteristics that I coded for each individual was what, if any, party affiliation that individual had. As a way to get at trends in bipartisanship within the foreign policy bureaucracy, the graph below shows the percentage of appointments included in the data set that are bipartisan in nature.* 

Some interesting points: Perhaps not surprisingly, the Truman administration represents an all-time high in the data. This is partially a function of the fact that Truman inherited many of FDR's appointments, but it's also partially due to the fact that the foreign policy bureaucracy was undergoing some pretty radical changes during this time period. In particular, the size of these agencies grew dramatically during the World War II period. Coding rules are also partially responsible, as I focused on individuals occupying positions at the assistant secretary level and up (where appropriate). By the early to mid-1950s, however, the rate of growth slows a bit and, while still increasing in size, it does so more slowly than in the first few years of the Cold War. The crash at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration might reflect some of the antics of Joseph McCarthy and Secretary Dulles, both of whom were more than a little keen to go after anyone remotely suspected of being communists. It could also be a function of the Republicans having been out of power for about two decades. Also of note, the late 1970s do see a slight slump in the level of bipartisanship, which is potentially in line with arguments concerning the impact of Vietnam on bipartisanship more generally. The Clinton administration sees a fairly sharp spike near the end, and the Bush administration also sees a dip in its later years, while the incoming Obama administration sees a slight increase.

More broadly, the work that I've done so far suggests a few general trends. First, I find some evidence that, all else equal, Democrats tend to be more likely than Republicans to make bipartisan appointments to the foreign policy bureaucracy—Even controlling for the Truman administration. Other models suggest this difference is more acute in the early Cold War period (again, also while controlling for Truman). Additionally, I also find some evidence to support the conventional wisdom concerning the use of bipartisan appointments as a means of building moderate coalitions and as a response to domestic political conditions. In particular Congressional support matters, but is perhaps a little more nuanced than the historical accounts often suggest, as the availability of moderates in Congress also seems to condition this relationship. It also appears as though Presidents make these appointments with an eye towards governing more broadly, as the composition of the Senate alone appears to have little impact.

So what? Well, with respect to current news my work would suggest that Obama's retention of Bob Gates and his appointment of Chuck Hagel are actually very much in line with broader trends in Democratic foreign policy appointments since World War II. Robert Lovett—formerly Stimson's assistant at the War Department—went on to serve as Truman's Secretary of Defense. Kennedy subsequently offered Lovett his choice of State, Defense, and Treasury. Though Lovett turned him down, Kennedy did end up appointing Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy—both Republicans—to important posts. While there are certainly other lesser-known bipartisan appointees, these folks are some of the more prominent. Furthermore, these trends emerged well before the Republicans had fully taken on the identity of the party of national security. Still, even in the early Cold War period the Republicans did attack Democrats for being soft on Communism, so this vulnerability was present in some incarnation. Accordingly, Democratic administrations perhaps had more to gain from trying to draw in Republicans than vice versa, as such appointments could confer some measure of credibility. 

Moving forward it will be interesting to see how these trends continue to develop. Despite the much publicized opposition to Hagel's appointment it is entirely possible that this is just media hype and Republican chest-thumping. David Karol at the Monkey Cage recently wrote about the House Republicans' position-taking when voting on the recent Fiscal Cliff deal. So it's easy to imagine that the Republican outcry over Hagel's nomination is really going to wither when it comes time for the Senate to vote. Though these situations are not completely comparable, giving Obama a hard time seems to be a means of gaining currency in the Republican Party these days. Beyond the current confirmation battle, much of this will depend on how the current debate over the GOP's foreign policy positions pans out (see Drezner's latest Foreign Affairs piece, for example). If the Democrats manage to become the party of national security moving forward, perhaps we might see a reversal of these trends. Given the current Republican field, however, I wouldn't hold my breath.**

 * Given that none of this work/data is published (yet?) please don't cite this post or data. I'm still very much hoping to update and improve this material as I go. I guess this is kind of the norm, right?

** In the off chance that anyone comments, please be aware that I have had trouble leaving comments in the recent past. On the rare occasion that we do get feedback, I feel rude not replying, so apologies in advance if this should happen.

Mapping Leadership Tenure

Confession time.  One of my favorite subreddits on reddit is r/mapporn; a subreddit dedicated to the most visually appealing maps from all historical periods and dealing with a variety of topics.  We, at QP, cannot get our fill of maps as we (especially Michael Flynn) have blogged about it a few times (see here, here, and here). Yesterday, this map of leadership tenure was posted from The Economist:

 

 

The cutoff date of 1945 seems like a controversial choice and the single image of the map did not come with clear coding rules as how to decisions were made.  Being familiar with the Archigos data project put together by Kristian Skrede Gleditsch and Giacomo Chiozza (paper here), I figured this was an easy task to replicate to see what a common political science data set says about leadership tenure (one that I have used in my own research).  To replicate this, I created 1/1/1945 as the cutoff point and any existing regime is assumed to start freshly on that date (an untenable assumption of course).  This left me with the number of days of leadership that I divided by 365.24 (Leap years could be off, so I averaged the year length).  Then, by averaging out the leadership tenure for this time period until 2004, created a range of values for each country.  In Stata, creating a choropleth map is not overly difficult using spmap package and two different guides found here and here. 

 

Post-1945 Replication:

 

 

The pastel color provides a bit more contrast and makes the missing data cases easily identifiable. Some of this may be due to a quick use of the kountry package an dmissing a few obvious lacking cases.  Additionally, the data in Archigos goes back to 1875, so replicating the map again using the full data set is possible and done here:

 

 

Expanding the data backwards introduces a bit more variation than just starting from 1945.  Naturally, with two wold wars included, leadership turnover may be expected to be shorter in some countries.  Of note, the US average jumps up a category. 

 

Update: By request, a few maps that are more colorblind friendly. Blue: 

 

Greyscale: 

 

Reading Downs and the likelihood of voting

Since tomorrow is national election day in the US, the get out the vote drives are in full swing.  So, in celebration of voting, a few relevant articles on academics and voting:

The rational voter paradox illustrated by Downs' An Economic Theory of Democracy suggests few should actually vote, but many do.  This may be due to voters not realizing what the costs to voting actually are, the benefits are imagined larger than they are, or there exists non-economic benefits (social or normative benefits). Brundt 1980 goes for the bounded rationality arguments on information and finds that discussing the rational voter model with undergraduates decreases their likelihood of voting.

Second, those expected to be familiar with the Downsian model are less likely to vote when accounting for education level (despite the obvious generalizability errors they make, still a fun read).  However, economists are much worse than political scientists (at least in California).

See you at the polls tomorrow! 

 

Bureaucratic Politics, Interservice Rivalries, and The Galactic Empire

The fact that this post follows so closely on the heels of my recent post regarding the sparseness of posts over the next couple of months should in no way be taken as negating my previous point. That said, Steve Saideman at the Duck has linked to this fairly lengthy piece on the role of inter-service rivalries in bringing about the downfall of the Galactic Empire. I will say that I have not had a chance to read the whole thing yet, but given that I 1) am a Star Wars enthusiast, and 2) have done work on inter-service rivalries, I find this to be potentially interesting. 

That is all.

Ice Breakers

I have posted a list of ice breaker questions below that can be fun to use during the first week of classes. Feel free to comment if you have any more suggestions!

1. If you could meet 3 people, real or fictional, who would they be?

2. Name a political event that has impacted your life. Explain how it has impacted your life.

3. What was your last Facebook status update?

4. Tell us something your parents do not know about you.

5. Write two truths about yourself and then a lie. (Then the class decides which facts are true and which one is a lie).

Using private information to beat Death

 

 

In Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey (not to be confused with their most Excellent Adventure), the duo are killed and sent to Hell.  On their way to an eternity of punishment, Death gives them the ability to escape their fate if they can best him in a game of their choosing.  The wager seems to be an obvious one to take: If you lose, you are stuck in hell for eternity; if you win, you can leave.  However, if you do not play the game, then you are still stuck in Hell without the ability to leave. In a previous dialogue (not shown in the above clip), Death boasts that he has never lost a game. 

If Death really never lost a game, it is reasonable to assume he has played billions of such games (assuming billions have encountered him and wanted to leave).  A variety of games are likely to have been proposed including athletic competitions (perhaps the most common up until this point in history), strategic games with full information, and even gambles.  Given this, Death would have to be some sort of super athlete that makes the right move every time (perfectly rational), and wins all lotteries. Even in fair lotteries, Death could only win so many coin tosses in a row before it appears the game is rigged in his favor.  As an aside, it is likely that no single player would know that he has played coin tosses before and won so many in the past, but his boast out to tip players off.  Thus, unfair lotteries biased in favor of the condemned are likely to still be skewed in their actual results for Death.

Given these constraints established by the movie, the question for the viewer becomes obvious: What game would you choose to play against Death?

 

After some pondering, the optimal game would be one of private information--where the player can control elements outside of Death's control.  As such, Death's ability to win depends on his ability to guess what the player has chosen. Given this proposition, then it appears that Bill and Ted stumbled upon the right course of action in their initial choice: Battleship.  In a world where you are playing the best strategy possible without cheating, the average win using a decent algorithm averages 40 moves. If we posit that Death plays perfectly strategically without knowing what the players know, then there is room for the other player to do better than Death.  So, Bill and Ted knowing he would put his ship in the J row may work out as a better strategy given their glimpse into Death's psychology. Clue, again, affords them room for private information in guessing which character committed the murder of Mr. Body.  Twister, on the other hand, I lack a convincing interpretation as it is clearly a game of athletics.  Perhaps Gymnasts have not challenged Death before.  Though, of course, I am sure the script was written with the idea of seeing an ancient mythological being playing modern games against two relatively airheaded dudes and not with a mind towards game theory.

Given this understanding of how to beat death, and while Bill and Ted succeed in finding the right path to victory, they allow too much for error.  If Death can lose at games of private information, then the best strategy is to make it a game of asymmetric private information instead of a symmetric one (technically, a symmetric, asymmetric information game) like Battleship.  Simply, offering Death a game of "Guess What Number I Am Thinking Of" and making the possible set of numbers contain all numbers would make Death's ability to guess the number indistinguishable from zero.  The game is much less fun, but the certainty it provides makes it an optimal choice given the symmetric alternative.  For this solution to be accurate, then it means that either people have never played an asymmetric information game against Death, that his strategy was superior to his opponent's in stategy previous games and could overcome the information asymmetry, or, perhaps, he was simply boasting to dissuade would-be challengers.  Also, this is what happens when you leave Comedy Central on during the day while doing house chores. 

USGS map sale

The United States Geologic Survey is having a deep sale on hundreds of maps.  To better decorate my office, I am picking up a few.  

Two that might be of interest to the political science crowd: US Command distribution across the globe:

 

The historical presidential elections map is also good:

 

 

Hunger Games: Civil Wars, Victory, and Repression

The movie version of the book The Hunger Games (Paperback, Kindle) is being released this week; the movie is expected to draw a large crowd and is already drawing superb ratings from critics. As such, given that there are both political and economic themes that run in the book that are ripe for political scientists and economists, I figured I would touch upon at least one of those interesting threads related to the study of international relations.  

Now, what I am drawing upon is purely from the first chapter of the book and can be easily gleaned from the trailer of the film.  As such, this discussion should not be spoiling anything.  However, if you are attempting to see this movie without any background whatsoever, consider this your spoiler warning for the post.

The book takes place in a future dystopian world set in North America. During this time period, political organization is non-democratic and highly centralized.  North America is divded into 13 districts excluding the Capitol.  As Katniss, the protagonist (the novel is told through first person narration), explains in the first chapter (p. 18):

The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens. Then came the Dark Days, the uprising of the districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games.

The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins.

In the above account, the districts mobilized to overthrow the central government (perhaps as revolutionaries or as separatists, it is not clear in thie passage) and the Capitol is able to persevere over all 13 districts.  1 district is obliterated and the 12 remaining districts are put in a worse position than they were prior to the conflict as the Capitol ramps up the repression of the districts by extracting tribute in the form of humans (the Capitol is quite repressive in other economic and political venues as well). Two children from each district are randomly selected to fight in the Hunger Games each year. The above passage is leading up to the point where we find out which children serve as tribute for the 74th annual Hunger Games. 

Since the government of the Capitol gets to play the obvious villain in this post-civil war story, we should be interested in the likelihood of some situation akin to this happening in reality.  That is, after a failed civil war attempt, are there times when the government uses its new position to further repress instead of adopting some form of accommodation to stave off a future rebellion.  While we are unlikely to see the specific scenario of the Hunger Games played out, increasing repression after a civil war is something that seems feasible.  We can think of civil war as a bargaining failure between two actors (rebels and the government) and, once a victor has been determined through the random number generator that is war, we are left with one party to reap the spoils.  It would make since that the a newly consolidated government would ramp up its extraction of resources beyond what it could achieve pre-war.

To understand increased repression after a conflict, I employed the Cingranelli-Richards data set (CIRI) and used their Physical Integrity Rights Index (henceforth refered to as either PI Rights or PIR) to look at their 9-point index as a proxy for government repression.  The index is composed of four 0-2 indicators of government respect or use of torture, disappearances, extra-judicial killing, and political imprisonment.  A score of 0 would be interpreted as little to no respect for physical integrity rights while a score of 8 is high respect for those rights.  The index runs from 1981-2010, so that helped to establish the sample of possible civil wars I could look at.  For civil wars, I used the Correlates of War intra-state war data (v 4.1) and employed the 19 conflicts that had system members as governments, started in 1982 or later, had ended by 2007 (a COW limitation), had over 1,000 battle deaths combined from each side, and the government had won the conflict (thus, excluding compromises, stalemates, and rebel victory).

To get a feel of the data and government use of repression, the first item I looked at was the PIR value one year before the conflict started and one year after the conflict had ended.  This produces the following scatter plot:

The line represents no change in the level of respect for PIRs while points below the line represent a decline and points above the line represent improvement.  So, in this instance, we have some cases in which the government represses more after a civil war.  Since there are only 13 dots for 19 cases, there must be some overlap.  As such, we can examine this as a change histogram as well:

The slim majority of cases are worse off with a few very large decreases in PIR values.  There are several states that show improvements as well.  However, a one year change may not be enough time for the government to adopt a new strategy for winning a civil war and the PIR value may be a hold-over from conducting the fighting in the civil wars.  Looking at 5 years ahead, the 18 cases (losing one observation due to temporal limitations) produces the following distribution:

Five years after the conclusion of the civil war looks generally better for those societies.  There still remains 28% of the sample that have a worse off situation, but 50% show an improvement.  Naturally, this is a small sample of intra-state wars and the possibility of a Panem type situation is certainly possible.  The 3 cases that show a change below -1 are Myanmar in 1982, Indonesia in 1992, and Ethiopia in 2000.  The Panem situation, if I understand the story correctly, has been ongoing for 74 years by the time of the first novel, no such analogue is available in the data given the limitations of the CIRI dataset.  Also, the amount of state capacity demonstrated by the Capitol in enforcing laws seems far superior to any of the examples above.  The strength of the state in the book is something that should decrease the probability of conflict by rational revolutionaries.

As an aside, one of the other side tidbits I have noticed is that all the characters that are in the Capitol have Roman names such as Cinna, Octvia, Caesar, and Plutarch (among others).  I am not sure if this has relevance beyond harkening to a city-dominated empire, is veiled allusion to the idea that the United states is becoming a new Rome, or some other significance I am not familiar with yet.  I do not know the full story of the Hunger Games, but I will likely be catching the first movie this weekend. 

The Danger of Online Articles

I listen to several podcasts each work during my daily commute to and from the office.  One podcast, the Skeptics Guide to the Universe (SGU), has several segments each week, with a few discussing scientific findings.  My favorite is a game for the panel where three scientific research findings are offered and the panelists guess which one is false. That is, a finding is made up by the host; often, it is in the opposite direction of a recent study. The other two findings are "science;" a result that has been published in a recent journal.

Two episodes ago (#330, 11/12/2011), the podcasters were sent an email from a listener that linked to a peer-reviewed study that offered the following result:

Remote, retroactive intercessory prayer said for a group is associated with a shorter stay in hospital and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection and should be considered for use in clinical practice.

That is, the BMJ study had people, in the year 2000, pray for patients with bloodstream infections during the years 1990-1996.  The study shows a statistically significant reduction in both the duration and level of the fevers the patients had. Naturally, this confounded both the guests and the panelists, which lead to a lengthy discussion about the obvious flaws of the study.  

Within a week of that podcast airing, a listener informed the hosts that the BMJ's December issue tends to contain whimsical studies for the sake of humor.  That is, the study should not be taken seriously or touted as coming from a peer-reviewed source.  In the printed version of the journal, these articles would be grouped together and the farcical nature of the study would be obvious.  For example, the 2010 issue contains the following studies:

• Effect on gastric function and symptoms of drinking wine, black tea, or schnapps with a Swiss cheese fondue: randomised controlled crossover trial
• Testing the validity of the Danish urban myth that alcohol can be absorbed through feet: open labelled self experimental study
• Beauty sleep: experimental study on the perceived health and attractiveness of sleep deprived people
• Can he fix it? Yes, he can!-- A case of a woman wearing Bob the Builder goggles to correct her idiopathic ocular neuromyotonia. 

The lesson learned, of course, is that the context of an article can mean everything.  Taking any of the above articles as serious, peer-reviewed work would be erroneous. While we in political science have special issues that can contextualize studies, I have not come across anything that demanded the context of the journal for an article to be interpretted correctly.  I am amused by the prospect of having our own fake studies.  This, perhaps, could be the proper forum for an article on the daily temperature high in Washington D.C. and Senate votes on force (with forecasting for global warming).