Activities & Achievements

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Activities & Achievements

Transforming information into knowledge
that advances human flourishing.

Explore how the Cline Center and its affiliates are pursuing our shared vision through research, education, collaboration, and outreach.

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? …