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5492. Failure to define killer robots means failure to regulate them
- Author:
- Johannes Lang, Rens van Munster, and Robin May Schott
- Publication Date:
- 02-2018
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Danish Institute for International Studies
- Abstract:
- Disagreements on how to define “autonomy” are stalling formal UN discussions on the compliance of autonomous weapons with international humanitarian law. A pragmatic approach that focuses on the weapon’s critical functions, such as target selection and firing, can help move discussions forward in the future.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
5493. Armed groups are here to stay
- Author:
- Jairo Munive and Finn Stepputat
- Publication Date:
- 01-2018
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Danish Institute for International Studies
- Abstract:
- Armed non-state actors are significant players in most conflicts. The international community is often forced to engage with them in order to secure humanitarian aid for civilians or to end armed political conflicts. The question of when and how to engage is being debated. We suggest a more pragmatic approach.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
5494. explaining globalisation scepticism
- Author:
- Erik Lundsgaarde
- Publication Date:
- 02-2018
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Danish Institute for International Studies
- Abstract:
- Critical public attitudes toward economic globalization reflect a response to different facets of globalization and varied consequences of international market integration for individuals. The distribution of benefits and losses related to globalization provides a starting point for numerous studies of attitudes toward economic integration. Individuals perceive globalization’s benefits differently depending on their sector of employment or level of educational attainment, among other factors. In addition to these explanations, attention to the institutions and policies that influence how governments engage with globalization and manage its domestic consequences can also inform the analysis of why scepticism to economic integration varies across national settings.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
5495. The European powers and the Sahel-Maghreb Crisis
- Author:
- Rasmus Alenius Boserup and Luis Martinez
- Publication Date:
- 03-2018
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Danish Institute for International Studies
- Abstract:
- In this new DIIS report senior researcher at DIIS, Rasmus Alenius Boserup and Research Director at Sciences Po, Luis Martinez, analyse how European policy-makers have recently come to perceive the Sahel as a threat to Europe’s own security and stability. Marking the end of the Sahel-Maghreb Research Platform – a research project funded by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and hosted by DIIS in collaboration with Voluntas Advisory – the report draws on input and analysis provided by an international team of experts and scholars associated to the project.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Europe
5496. What Makes Experts Reliable?
- Author:
- Kyle L Marquardt
- Publication Date:
- 06-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
- Abstract:
- Many datasets use experts to code latent quantities of interest. However, scholars have not explored either the factors affecting expert reliability or the degree to which these factors influence estimates of latent concepts. Here we systematically analyze potential correlates of expert reliability using six randomly selected variables from a cross-national panel dataset, V-Dem v8. The V-Dem project includes a diverse group of over 3,000 experts and uses an IRT model to incorporate variation in both expert reliability and scale perception into its data aggregation process. In the process, the IRT model produces an estimate of expert reliability, which affects the relative contribution of an expert to the model. We examine a variety of factors that could correlate with reliability, and find little evidence of theoretically-untenable bias due to expert characteristics. On the other hand, there is evidence that attentive and condent experts who have a basic contextual knowledge of the concept of democracy are more reliable.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
5497. How to Make Causal Inferences with Time-Series Cross-Sectional Data under Selection on Observables
- Author:
- Matthew Blackwell and Adam Glynn
- Publication Date:
- 05-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
- Abstract:
- Repeated measurements of the same countries, people, or groups over time are vital to many fields of political science. These measurements, sometimes called time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) data, allow researchers to estimate a broad set of causal quantities, including contemporaneous and lagged treatment effects. Unfortunately, popular methods for TSCS data can only produce valid inferences for lagged effects under very strong assumptions. In this paper, we use potential outcomes to define causal quantities of interest in this settings and clarify how standard models like the autoregressive distributed lag model can produce biased estimates of these quantities due to post-treatment conditioning. We then describe two estimation strategies that avoid these post-treatment biases—inverse probability weighting and structural nested mean models—and show via simulations that they can outperform standard approaches in small sample settings. We illustrate these methods in a study of how welfare spending affects terrorism.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
5498. Self-Censorship in Authoritarian States: Response bias in measures of popular support in China
- Author:
- Daniel Robinson and Marcus Tannenberg
- Publication Date:
- 04-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
- Abstract:
- The study of popular support for authoritarian regimes, and the comparative study of political attitudes, has long relied on the assumption that survey respondents provide truthful answers on surveys. However, when measuring regime support in closed political systems there is a distinct risk that individuals are less than forthright due to fear that their opinions may be made known to the public or the authorities. In order to test this assumption, we conducted a novel web-based survey in China in which we included four list experiments of commonly used items in the comparative literature on regime support. We find systematic bias for all four measures as a result of selfcensorship; substantially more individuals state that they support the regime with direct questioning than do when presented with our anonymous, indirect list experiments. The level of self-censorship, which ranges from 16 to 22 percentage points, is considerably higher than previously thought. Selfcensorship is further most prevalent among the wealthy, urban, female and younger respondents. These findings indicate that prior studies that have found high levels of support for the Chinese regime using these particular measures likely overestimate the true level of support. Further, crossnational studies which compare popular support across regime type may be systematically biased if responses are not subject to the same level of falsification across regime types.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
5499. Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy Dataset: Political Institutions in the Long 19th Century
- Author:
- Carl Henrik Knutsen
- Publication Date:
- 04-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
- Abstract:
- The Historical Varieties of Democracy Dataset (Historical V-Dem) is a new dataset containing about 260 indicators, both factual and evaluative, describing various aspects of political regimes and state institutions. The dataset covers 91 polities globally – including most large, sovereign states, as well as some semi-sovereign entities and large colonies – from 1789 to 1920 for many cases. The majority of the indicators are also included in the Varieties of Democracy dataset, which covers the period from 1900 to the present – and together these two datasets cover the bulk of “modern history”. Historical V-Dem also includes several new indicators, covering features that are pertinent for 19thcentury polities. We describe the data, the process of coding, and the different strategies employed in Historical V-Dem to cope with issues of reliability and validity and ensure inter-temporal- and cross-country comparability. To illustrate the potential uses of the dataset we provide a descriptive account of patterns of democratization in the “long 19th century.” Finally, we perform an empirical investigation of how inter-state war relates to subsequent democratization.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
5500. Reassessing the Democratic Peace: A Novel Test Based on the Varieties of Democracy Data
- Author:
- Håvard Hegre, Michael Bernhard, and Jan Teorell
- Publication Date:
- 03-2018
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
- Abstract:
- The democratic peace is one of the most robust findings in international relations. Yet it suffers from two important limitations. First, even those who fully embrace the democratic peace have difficulty precisely identifying which facet of democracy drives the result. Second, the vast majority of studies have relied on a single measure of democracy – the Polity index. This paper reassesses interstate conflict on several new measures of democracy and their disaggregated components from the Varieties of Democracy project in a global sample of 173 countries from 1900–2010 (www.v-dem.net). We theorize three distinct mechanisms of constraint that may explain why some countries do not engage in military conflict with each other: formal vertical (e.g. elections), informal vertical (e.g. civil society activism), and horizontal accountability (e.g. interbranch constraint on the executive). We find that the formal vertical channels of accountability provided by elections are not as crucial as horizontal constraint and the informal vertical accountability provided by a strong civil society.
- Topic:
- International Affairs
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus