Author Archives: hhegre
Forecasting civil conflict along the shared socioeconomic pathways
A new and updated version of our armed conflict forecasts were recently published in Environmental Research Letters: ‘Forecasting civil conflict along the shared socioeconomic pathways’, written by myself as well as Halvard Buhaug, Katherine V. Calvin, Jonas Nordkvelle, Stephanie T. Waldhoff, and Elisabeth Gilmore. More details, link to the open-access article, and replication data can be found here.
Updated data on institutions and elections, 1960–2012
Tore Wig, myself, and Pat Regan just published an article in Research & Politics that presents an updated version of the Institutions and Elections Project (IAEP) dataset, originally developed by Pat and David Clark. The dataset comprises information on 107 de jure institutional provisions, and 16 variables related to electoral procedures and electoral events, for 170 countries in the period 1960–2012. The article is freely available, as well as the dataset, codebook, and other material.
This figure illustrates the constitutional provisions for elections in Argentina. We have also posted such illustrations for all countries and all 123 variables.
Poor research or what?
Of interest to those that read Norwegian: My colleague Nils Petter Gleditsch just published a PRIO blog post in response to a recent article in the Norwegian daily Aftenposten where Øivind Østerud criticizes the ‘waning-of-war’ argument promoted by Steven Pinker and several PRIO researchers. As Nils Petter notes, the debate is quite parochial, but I agree with Nils Petter that attempts to counter solid empirical research with a couple of anecdotes sometimes must be responded to…
Democracy, democratization, and political violence
The process of democratization is often violent in the short run, and democratic governments are more constrained in their use of force against insurgents than non-democratic authorities. But are democracies really more prone to political violence than other political systems? This is the theme of a short article published at the International Relations and Security Network (ISN) at ETH Zürich.
ISA and blogs
The Guardian just published a news item on a recent proposal from the 2013 executive committee of the International Studies Association to sever ‘any connection between blogs and ISA journals’ – full details are given in a recent blog post by Stephen Saideman.
I am member of this year’s executive committee of the ISA and also on the editorial board of an ISA journal. I here make use of my own rarely-updated blog to voice my disagreement with the proposal and demonstrate that I am happy to violate it. As noted by Kristian Gleditsch in a comment to the Guardian article, this proposal is not yet adopted policy and will be subject to debate within the organization.
Håvard Hegre 