The importance of sovereign bond ratings has grown recently as assessments by credit rating agencies~CRAs! influence the cost of capital+ Understanding how CRAs determine country ratings is difficult based on the secretive nature of these agencies+ Controlling for the common explanations in the literature, we use panel data and interviews to investigate the role of the "democratic advantage" and other determinants on bond ratings set by Moody's Investor Services, Standard and Poor's, and Fitch Ratings for fifty developing countries from 1987 to 2003+ We find that regime type and most other political factors have little effect on bond raters+ Instead, trade, inflation, growth, and bond default strongly affect sovereign ratings+ The message for policymakers in developing countries is that factors that support bond repayment are most useful for enhancing CRA ratings+The single most important visitor to a developing country was the representative from a western aid agency in the 1960s; the commercial banker eager to recycle OPEC surpluses in the 1970s; the IMF official in the 1980s, the "lost decade+" Since then, it has been the sovereign analyst from one of the leading rating agencies, Moody's Investor Services, Standard and Poor's or Fitch+The authors' names are listed alphabetically to indicate equal contribution+ For comments on previous versions of this article, we are grateful to
Prior research in political science and other disciplines demonstrates the pedagogical and practical benefits of active learning. Less is known, however, about the extent to which active learning is used in political science classrooms. This study assesses the prioritization of active learning in "gateway" political science courses, paying specific attention to simulations, structured debates, and the case method. Nearly five hundred individual course syllabi for introductory-level political science courses are examined. Although the level of active learning prioritization is surprisingly low, the dimensions on which it varies suggest opportunities for adoption across subfields and classes of varying size.
The Financial Crisis in the late 1990s and the ongoing crisis have showed the importance of creating an early warning system (EWS) to lessen economic, political, and foreign policy fallout. Surprisingly, the EWS literature rarely considers the role of political institutions to detect economic dangers that can be harbingers of conflict. Controlling for common explanations in the literature, we use panel data for fifty developing countries from 1987 to 2004 to investigate the effect of political determinants for predicting economic crises. Although most political variables appear to have little influence in forecasting defaults or currency crises, models specified with bond ratings from the credit rating agencies can be helpful for predicting the onset of crisis. Our research is a first step toward gaining insights into how best to anticipate crisis that may prove beneficial particularly in light of the current global crisis.Since 2008 the global financial system has been in various stages of crisis and meltdown. The crisis began with the failures of major European financial houses because of their exposure to the U.S. subprime market, expanded to include the bankruptcy and bailout of prominent financial actors in the United States and most recently is manifesting itself as a European sovereign debt crisis. Major financial crises are often watershed moments that potentially affect conflict between and within states as well as international diplomacy, more generally. As the international system continues to deal with the current crisis, we are
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.