This PowerPoint presentation was presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association on September 3-6, 2009. It provides an overview of research on national institutions, societal contexts and societal welfare, broadly defined.
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The Societal Infrastructures and Development Project (SID): Gauging Differences in Institutional Designs
Popular Efficacy in the Democratic Era: A Reexamination of Electoral Accountability in the United States, 1828-2000
Social scientists have long criticized American voters for being "unsophisticated" in the way they acquire and use political information. The low level of political sophistication leaves them vulnerable to manipulation by political "elites," whose sway over voters is deemed incontrovertible and…
Automatic Document Categorization for Highly Nuanced Topics in Massive-Scale Document Collections: The SPEED BIN Program
This whitepaper offers a brief introduction to the BIN system of the Social, Political and Economic Event Database (SPEED) project. BIN provides automatic document categorization of highly nuanced topics across massive-scale document archives. The BIN system allows a group of trained human…
Institutions and Economic Growth: An Empirical Assessment of the Post-WW II Era
This paper was presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association on September 1-5, 2010. This paper uses data from an on-going project, the…
The Endurance of National Constitutions
Constitutions are supposed to provide an enduring structure for politics. Yet only half live more than nineteen years. Why is it that some constitutions endure while others do not? In The Endurance of National Constitutions, Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton examine the causes of…
Definitions of Destabilizing Events in SPEED
This document is designed to provide operators of the EXTRACT suite of programs with an accessible guide to the definition and meaning of events intended to be captured in the Societal Stability Protocol (SSP) with the Social, Political and Economic Event Database (SPEED) project. It is a…
Do "We" Have a Stake in This War? A Worldwide Test of the In-Group Out-Group Hypothesis Using Open-Source Intelligence
This paper was presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association on March 16-19. It discusses how international relations scholars have long suspected that popular support for war is structured in part by in-group reactions to out-group threats. Huntington’…
The Coup D'Etat Project (CDP)
Coup d'états are important events in the life of a country. They constitute an important subset of irregular transfers of political power that can have important and enduring consequences for a country’s well-being. This notwithstanding, a comprehensive and well-documented inventory of coups has…
Fault Lines: Why the Republicans Lost Congress (Controversies in Electoral Democracy and Representation)
In some years elections bring about enduring changes to the American political scene. In 2006, a pivotal election year, the Republicans suffered a resounding defeat, losing the House and Senate for the first time since the 1994 "Republican Revolution." But what caused this pivotal shift? …
Gauging Civil Unrest with SPEED Data: The Societal Stability Protocol and the Intensity of Civil Unrest
Destabilizing events - whether they are political expression events, politically motivated attacks, disruptive state acts, or some other manifestation of discontent - can vary enormously in their intensity. It is important to capture differences in intensity because they can affect the impact of…
Measuring Cross-National and Inter-Temporal Differences in Law-Based Orders: 1946-2010
While scholars have grappled with the conceptual ambiguities surrounding the concept of “the rule of law” for well over a century, there has been a renewed interest in this concept in the last two decades. This revival is due in large part to widespread agreement that law based order plays a…
Data Science Resources at Illinois
There are a number of data science resources at the University of Illinois that support research in the social sciences and digital humanities. Use the link below to view a list (in alphabetical order) of the groups who are conducting extreme-scale social science and digital humanities…
Presidential Campaigns and Presidential Accountability (Democracy, Free Enterprise, and the Rule)
In investigating the presidential campaigns and early administrations of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, Presidential Campaigns and Presidential Accountability shows how campaign promises are realized in government once the victor is established in the Oval…
The Origins of Destabilizing Events
Destabilizing events such as those captured by SPEED's Societal Stability Protocol (SSP) - protests, politically motivated attacks, disruptive state acts, mass movements of people, irregular transfers of political power - do not happen in a vacuum. Rather, most are rooted in something.…
Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinions Surveys and the Will of the People
Scott Athaus
Cambridge University Press, 2003