Threat-Inducing Violent Events Exacerbate Social Desirability Bias in Survey Responses By : Shane P. Singh and Jarslav Tir 

Published : 14 May 2021

Abstract:

A key challenge in survey research is social desirability bias: respondents feel pressured to report acceptable attitudes and behaviors. Building on established findings, we argue that threat-inducing violent events are a heretofore unaccounted for driver of social desirability bias. We probe this argument by investigating whether fatal terror attacks lead respondents to overreport past electoral participation, a well-known and measurable result of social desirability bias. Using a cross-national analysis and natural and survey experiments, we show that fatal terror attacks generate turnout overreporting. This highlights that threat-inducing violent events induce social desirability, that researchers need to account for the timing of survey fieldwork vis-à-vis such events, and that some of the previously reported post-violent conflict increases in political participation may be more apparent than real.

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Incentivizing Peace: How International Organizations Can Help Prevent Civil Wars in Member Countries

 Published: 21 February 2018

Abstract: 

Civil wars are among the most difficult problems in world politics. While mediation, intervention, and peacekeeping have produced some positive results in helping to end civil wars, they fall short in preventing them in the first place. In Incentivizing Peace, Jaroslav Tir and Johannes Karreth show that considering civil wars from a developmental perspective presents opportunities to prevent the escalation of nascent armed conflicts into full-scale civil wars. The authors demonstrate that highly-structured intergovernmental organizations (IGOs such as the World Bank, IMF, or regional development banks) are particularly well-positioned to engage in civil war prevention. When such IGOs have been actively engaged in member states on the edge, their potent economic tools have helped to steer rebel-government interactions away from escalation and toward peaceful settlement. Incentivizing Peace provides enlightening case evidence that IGO participation is a key to better predicting, and thus preventing, the outbreak of civil war.

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• Dissertation: The Different Political Worlds of Women and Men
• Committee: Anand Sokhey (Chair), John Griffin, Tamar Malloy, Jennifer Wolak, Celeste Montoya (Women and Gender Studies)
• Major Fields: American Politics, Public Policy, Women’s Studies
• Ph.D. 2020

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• Dissertation: A Responsive Court?: The Influence of Public Opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court
• Committee: Vanessa Baird (Chair), Jennifer Wolak, Anand Sokhey, Joshua Strayhorn, Elizabeth Skewes (Journalism)
• Major Fields: American Politics, Methods
• Ph.D. 2020
• Assistant Teaching Professor for the Department of Political Science, �鶹ӰԺ

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• Dissertation: Science in an Intergenerational Democracy
• Committee: Steven Vanderheiden (Chair), Michaele Ferguson, Krister Andersson, Benjamin Hale (Environmental Studies), Elisabeth Ellis, University of Otago
• Major Fields: Political Theory, Public Policy, Methods
• Ph.D. 2020
• Manager of Data Analytics - Global Security Central Programs, Uber

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Dorr, DC, Shin, AJ. War, inequality, and taxation. Econ Polit.&�Բ�����;2020;&�Բ�����;00:&�Բ�����;1–&�Բ�����;29.&�Բ�����;

Published: 30 October 2020

Abstract:

Existing studies highlight the importance of the compensatory demand among the conscripted poor to explain why wars lead to income and inheritance tax hikes for the rich. We propose a more nuanced argument that war mobilization leads to a class conflict in which the poor want the rich to pay more taxes in exchange for conscription while the rich seek lower taxes because they expect war‐related losses of their wealth. Mass warfare imposes higher tax burdens on the rich only when elites lack economic resources to prevent such policies. Using a panel analysis of up to 18 countries from the late nineteenth century to the 2010s as well as a subnational analysis of Senate roll call votes on tax bills introduced between 1913 and 2008, we corroborate our argument that elites' share of national income conditions how war mobilization shapes the trajectories of tax regimes.

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By: Krister Andersson, Kimberlee Chang, Adriana Molina-Garzon

Publication Date: October 2020

Abstract:

 Strong local institutions are important for the successful governance of common-pool resources (CPRs), but why do such institutions emerge in the first place and why do they sometimes not emerge at all? We argue that voluntary local leaders play an important role in the initiation of self-governance institutions because such leaders can directly affect local users’ perceived costs and benefits associated with self-rule. Drawing on recent work on leadership in organizational behavior, we propose that voluntary leaders can facilitate a cooperative process of local rule creation by exhibiting unselfish behavior and leading by example. We posit that such forms of leadership are particularly important when resource users are weakly motivated to act collectively, such as when confronted with “creeping” environmental problems. We test these ideas by using observations from a laboratory-in-the-field experiment with 128 users of forest commons in Bolivia and Uganda. We find that participants’ agreement to create new rules was significantly stronger in group rounds where voluntary, unselfish leaders were present. We show that unselfish leadership actions make the biggest difference for rule creation under high levels of uncertainty, such as when the resource is in subtle decline and intragroup communication sparse.

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Also, CU Today published a press release about the article that you can read here!

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• Dissertation: Protesting for More: Corruption, Democracy, and the Making of Demands
• Committee: Carew Boulding (Chair), Andy Baker, David Brown, Rachel Rinaldo (Sociology) and Moises Arce (Tulane University)
• Major Fields: Comparative Politics, International Relations
• Ph.D . 2020
• Assistant Professor (Lecturer in UK terminology) in the Department of Government at the 

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• Dissertation: Why So Angry? Understanding the Influences of Elite Anger on the American Electorate
• Committee: Jennifer Wolak (Chair), Anand Sokhey, Jennifer Fitzgerald, Josh Strayhorn, and Leaf Van Boven (Psychology)
• Major Fields: American Politics, Methods
• Ph.D. 2020
• Lecturer, Data Analytics and Computational Social Science (DACSS) program at the

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• Dissertation: Power and the Politics of Madness: Mental Illness at the Intersection of State and Society
• Committee: Michaele Ferguson (Chair), Steven Vanderheiden, Tamar Malloy, Carew Boulding, and Andrew Dilts (Loyola Marymount University)
• Major Fields: Political Theory, Comparative Politics
• Ph.D. 2020
• Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science,

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