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…
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The SPEED Project's Societal Stability Protocol: An Overview
This document provides an introduction to, and an overview of, the SPEED Project's Societal Stability Protocol (SSP). The SSP's aim is to generate event data that will advance our understanding of civil unrest in the post-WWII era. The SSP's focus is on human-initiated destabilizing…
Collaborative Research on Extreme-Scale Text Analytics (CRESTA) Workshop
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
…
Representation of Race and Gender in News-Gazette Crime Coverage
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…
SPEED's Societal Stability Protocol and the Study of Civil Unrest: An Overview and Comparison with Other Event Data Projects
SPEED is a technology-intensive effort to collect a comprehensive body of global event data for the Post WWII era. It is a protocol-driven system that was designed to provide insights into key behavioral patterns and relationships that are valid across countries and over time. SPEED's Societal…
Gauging Cross-national Differences in Educational Attainment: A 60 Year Look at Global Educational Trends
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.…
Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People
Since so few people appear knowledgeable about public affairs, one might question whether collective policy preferences revealed in opinion surveys accurately convey the distribution of voices and interests in a society. Scott Althaus' comprehensive analysis of the relationship between knowledge…
Transforming Textual Information on Events into Event Data within SPEED
Creating a valid and reliable body of event data requires meeting a number of challenges (clearly defining the events to be studied, developing reliable sources of information on those events, identifying source documents with relevant information, etc.). The fact that most event data projects,…
The Societal Infrastructures and Development Project (SID): Gauging Differences in Institutional Designs
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.
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’…