This study set out to analyze demographic characteristics of criminal suspects included in crime reporting published by the Champaign (Illinois) News-Gazette newspaper, and to compare the demographics of suspects in the news to the demographics of suspects arrested or jailed in Champaign County. To our knowledge, no such study has previously been performed for any news outlet in Champaign County.

This article outlines an effort to gauge cross-national and inter-temporal differences in law-based orders for 165 nations from 1850 to 2010. Despite the increasing importance attributed to “the rule of law,” there have been few efforts to develop objective measures of it. The conceptual foundations for this effort rest on a review of centuries of scholarship concerning the societal utility of law. Data are drawn from a variety of sources to create two composite measures.

This article examines the destabilizing impact of rapid-onset, climate-related disasters. It uses a sample of storms and floods in conjunction with two intensity measures of civil unrest to examine two perspectives on human reactions to disasters (conflictual, cooperative). It also uses insights from the contentious politics literature to understand how emotions posited by the conflictual perspective are transformed into destabilizing acts.

"Big data" in the form of unstructured text poses challenges and opportunities to social scientists committed to advancing research frontiers. Because machine-based and humancentric approaches to content analysis have different strengths for extracting information from unstructured text, we argue for a collaborative, hybrid approach that combines their comparative advantages.

The Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) project is a large-scale effort initiated by the Cline Center as part of its Societal Infrastructures and Development (SID) project. Its objective is to fill an important void in the field of comparative politics by creating a set of time-varying measures that gauge the nature and depth of country-specific socio-cultural cleavages. It focuses on 165 of the largest countries in the world (all countries with a population above 500,000 in 2004) during the post-WWII era. The data-gathering phase has two main components.

Scott Athaus

Cambridge University Press, 2003

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 vital role in societal development. Unfortunately, there is much less agreement on conceptualizing the rule of law.