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A House United: Mass Media Structure, Economic Development, and the Emergence of Civil Conflict (under review)

In this paper I develop and test a theoretical account of the structural effects of mass communication on the probability of civil war onset. I argue that various mass media – radio, television, newsprint, etc. – are members of a class of communicative structures known as public communicative structures, which are defined by their ability to transmit synchronized messages in a manner which generates joint awareness of those messages. I demonstrate that because such structures allow for the creation of shared experiences on a national scale, they facilitate the intersubjective cohesion of national loyalties while inhibiting the emergence of sub-national loyalty fragmentation. I test this theory using newly compiled data on mass media structures in 177 countries for the period 1945-1999. The primary finding is that as the density (i.e. per capita reception capability) of national mass media structures increases, the probability of civil war onset decreases dramatically.

(For an expanded version of this argument, including additional observable implications, please see Chapter 5 of my dissertation.)

When Preferences and Commitments Collide: The Effect of Relative Partisan Shifts on International Treaty Compliance - with Joseph M. Grieco and Christopher F. Gelpi (forthcoming, International Organization)

In this paper, we demonstrate that changes in the partisan orientation of a country's executive branch influence the likelihood that the government of that country with comply with international legal commitments aimed at integration of capital markets. We argue that relative shifts in executive partisan orientation, whether towards the left or towards the right, represent important shifts in "national preferences" that have heretofore been absent from statistical models of treaty compliance. Using a matching estimator combined with a genetic algorithm to maximize balance in our sample, we show that the causal impact of a state signing Article VIII of the IMF Articles of Agreement is conditioned by right-to-left shifts in partisan orientation. The evidence indicates that such preference changes reduce the constraining effects of Article VIII, but also indicates that Article VIII continues to exercise significant causal effects even in the face of relative shifts in executive partisan orientation.

The Geometry of Security: Modeling Interstate Alliances as Evolving Networks (under review)

This paper makes two separate, but interrelated, claims. The first is that interstate military alliances should be conceptualized not only as a means to credibly reveal pre-existing interests, but also as tools that are used by states to construct interests through the generation of mutual expectations. The second is that accurate statistical modeling of such alliances requires that researchers escape the assumptions of dyadic independence built into nearly every statistical tool (logit, probit, proportional hazards, etc.) currently used by international relations scholars. The use of stochastic actor-oriented models, combined with Markov simulations of network evolution, is shown to be a productive alternative method of modeling international alliances, which allows the researcher to incorporate theory-driven assumptions about patterns of dyadic interdependence directly into the functional form of the statistical model.

Domestic Audiences and International Conflict: Bargaining in the Shadow of Mass Mediated Publics

Much of the contemporary literature on interstate conflict highlights the importance of signaling processes between potential and actual adversaries.  The assumption frequently made in such work is that so-called "audience costs" allow leaders to more credibly signal their intentions by heightening the stakes leaders face in diverging from their stated positions.  However, this mechanism assumes the presence of a particular kind of collective audience: a mass audience capable of jointly receiving messages and capable of generating coordinated responses to such messages.  I argue that such mass mediated publics are not naturally occurring characteristics of the interstate system, but rather are constituted by particular domestic communicative structures.  Moreover, those structures are not constants, but instead vary considerably over time and space.  Using cross-national time-series data for the period 1945-1998, I demonstrate that the constraints produced by differing levels of media freedom and media density lead to significant differences in interstate conflict behavior, including the likelihood of dispute initiation and reciprocation.  I further show that the “democratic peace” effect is actually conditional on domestic communicative structures, operating only in the presence of sufficiently free and sufficiently dense mass media networks.