Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: More than two decades ago, the authors of Political Action (Barnes et al., 1979) predicted that what was then called ?unconventional political participation? would become more widespread throughout advanced industrial societies, because it was part of a deep-rooted intergenerational change. Time series data from the 1974 Political Action survey, together with data from four waves of the World Values Surveys demonstrates that this change has indeed taken place?to such an extent that petitions, boycotts and other forms of direct action are no longer unconventional but have become more or less normal actions for a large part of the citizenry of post-industrial societies.
This type of elite-challenging actions also played an important part in the Third Wave of democratization?but after the transition to democracy, most of the new democracies subsequently experienced a post-honeymoon phase of disillusionment with democracy, in which direct political action declined. This paper analyzes data from more than 70 countries containing more than 80 percent of the world?s population, interpreting the long-term dynamics of elite-challenging political participation in both established democracies and new democracies. Our interpretation implies that the current decline in direct political action in the new democracies is a ?post-honeymoon? period effect; in the long run, we expect that elite-challenging activity will move on an upward trajectory in most of the new democracies, as has been the case in virtually all established democracies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Homicide rates in the United States rose significantly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. City level analysis reveals that there was substantial variation in homicide trends during this period. This project examines the relationship between the number of police in 68 major US cities and the presence, magnitude, and duration of the homicide epidemic. Preliminary findings indicate that that the number of police in a city had no significant effect on the parameters of the homicide epidemic, despite claims to the contrary.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Homicide rates in the United States rose significantly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. City level analysis reveals that there was substantial variation in homicide trends during this period. This project examines the relationship between the number of police in 68 major US cities and the presence, magnitude, and duration of the homicide epidemic. Preliminary findings indicate that that the number of police in a city had no significant effect on the parameters of the homicide epidemic, despite claims to the contrary.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The conventional discourse relating climate change to conflict focuses on long-term trends in temperature and precipitation that define ecosystems and their subsequent impact on access to renewable natural resources. Because these changes occur over long time periods, existing operationalizations of resource scarcity, such as measures of land degradation and desertification, are mostly stationary and perform poorly in capturing the proximate factors that may "trigger" conflict. We argue that this conventional discourse overlooks one of the key findings emanating from the global climate models on which these predictions are based: increased variance around mean temperatures and precipitation. We approach this question from two perspectives. First, we estimate the impact of both long-term trends in climate (operationalized as climate zones and land degradation) and short-term climatic variance (operationalized as change in annual rainfall) on civil conflict onset in Sub-Saharan Africa. We find that both operationalizations have a significant impact on conflict onset. More temperate, fertile climates are associated with a decreased likelihood of conflict. Moreover, negative changes in rainfall are associated with an increased likelihood of conflict in the following year. Second, we assess the outlook for the future based on our analysis of predicted changes in precipitation means and variance over the period 1980-2059. We find that total annual precipitation shows a positive linear trend, whereas no statistically significant trend is found in intra-annual or interannual variance, suggesting that monsoon patterns in Africa are unlikely to be affected by expected changes in climate. We conclude that strategies for avoiding conflict must focus on breaking the direct dependence of subsistence agriculturalists on rainfall as a source of crop water, even as the variability of access to this resource is not predicted to increase in the future.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Multiple studies have been conducted on the issue of U.S. black-white family formation differences in response to trends showing that African Americans are increasingly less likely than whites to ever marry, more likely to divorce when marriage does occur, and less likely than whites to remarry. Explanations generally focus on one of three theories, ranging from economic class and race stratification, the skewed gender ratio in the African-American marriage market, and historic and present cultural differences. This analysis takes a new approach to an old question. I ask what happens to marriage trends for blacks and whites when they are removed from larger society and placed in a new structural context. Specifically, I examine nuptial patterns among the races within the U.S. military, a total institution in the Goffmanian sense, which serves as a near natural control for many of the arguments presented in the literature on the race-driven retreat from marriage.

Why the military? The volunteer armed forces have long attracted disproportionate numbers of minorities because it is thought to offer comparatively better career opportunity and employment stability than the civilian sector. The gender ratio issue is also reversed in the military, favoring women on the order of 7 to 1, and the number of African American “marriageable men” who are financially stable is notably improved from the civilian marriage market. Most importantly, there is evidence that total institutionalism enables the military to effectively enforce nondiscriminatory policies, leading to improved race relations. Superior equal opportunity policy, desegregated housing and work conditions, and increased overall interracial interaction may serve as a control for the difficult to measure variable of racism in civilian society.

I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which is the only longitudinal database to contain a military sub-sample along with a civilian sample. To model the probability of marriage for both civilians and military personnel by race, I run a series of event history and multivariate propensity score matching analyses. I find that the racial differential in marital trends that exists in civilian society disappears in the military environment; African American and white marriage rates do not differ from one another in the military as they do in the civilian world. Beyond the lessened importance of race in predicting union formation, family formation rates for all military members are substantially higher than for civilians. Additional analyses testing the likelihood of marital dissolution using the 1999 Survey of Active Duty Personnel along with the 1999 Current Population Survey as its civilian analysis counterpart are currently underway.