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’s (1993, 1996) “clash of civilizations” hypothesis is one of the most controversial and under-tested extensions of this perspective within international relations.

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 Societal Infrastructures and Development Project (SID) to examine the determinants of wealth. The analysis focuses on institutions (economic, legal and political) and national contexts (education, geography, natural resources).

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.

Educational attainment is both a driver of developmental processes and a key indicator of human development. Yet cross-national data on educational attainment for the post WWII era is spotty, despite significant efforts by the UN and several highly respected academic teams to compile it. Compounding the data availability problems in this area is the uneven distribution of missing information across regions of the world: the highest rates of missing data are in Africa and the post-Soviet states.

The 2018 Collaborative Research on Extreme-Scale Text Analytics (CRESTA) workshop was held on February 1-4, 2018, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. The theme for this workshop was “Text Analytics Applications for Monitoring and

News media provide a unique source of information on important societal developments, both contemporary and historical. Consequently, over the past forty years, social scientists have attempted to utilize media data to study important questions in a number of fields. But these efforts have been subjected to sobering critiques in an on-going debate over the utility of media data in social science research. The advent of the Information Age has both raised the stakes of this sustained debate and restructured it.

This document outlines the procedures and criteria used to delineate episodes of civil strife for 164 countries in the world for the period from January 1, 1946 to December 31, 2005. Prior research has been handicapped by a lack of data on civil strife events and defensible criteria for differentiating major episodes of civil strife from others. We use an inductive, iterative approach that builds on the work of the Political Instability Task Force and the Social, Political and Economic Event Database project (SPEED).

The SPEED’s project capacity to contribute to advances in social research is bounded by the breadth and depth of its information base and the tools employed to mine data from that information base. If events are not captured in an information base – or identified using data mining tools – then they cannot be used for research purposes. Consequently, we employed a range of technologies to enhance both the scope of the information base and our ability to mine relevant data embedded in it. The first section of this document provides a brief overview of SPEED’s global news archive.

Extracting information from global news reports in the post WWII era makes it possible to capitalize on the billions of dollars that have been invested in reporting on newsworthy events during that timeframe. It also offers unprecedented opportunities to improve our understanding of important societal developments and processes. Developing empirically well-grounded insights into these matters, however, requires that the data extracted from news reports are robust and dependable. This paper analyzes the data generation process employed by SPEED's Societal Stability Protocol.