Although individual citizens perceive the human rights conditions in their country differently, existing research on human rights and public opinion has tended to ignore the possible impact from international sources of information. This article builds upon previous research on human rights, public opinion, and international organizations by arguing that citizens will perceive the human rights conditions in their country more negatively when their country is shamed by the international community for human rights violations. This hypothesis is tested using both observational and experimental methods. I use multilevel modeling and survey responses from both the Gallup International Millennium Survey and the World Values Survey to show that individual human rights perceptions are negatively related to the adoption of resolutions by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights shaming a survey respondent’s government for human rights abuses, as well as the number of human rights-focused international nongovernmental organizations with members or volunteers living within the survey respondent’s country. These results are supplemented by an original, web-based experiment on human rights perceptions in the United States and India in which survey respondents are exposed to an experimental manipulation modeled on press statements from Amnesty International shaming the survey respondent’s country for human rights abuses.

Previous research has shown that a leader's preconflict tenure affects the likelihood of conflict occurrence, while conflict outcomes affect a leader's postconflict tenure. I argue that a leader's preconflict tenure should affect not only conflict occurrence but conflict outcomes as well, specifically by increasing a leader's professional competence and increasing the likelihood that the state will emerge victorious from international crises. This effect should weaken as the constraints upon leaders' behaviors increase and their competence becomes less important for policy outcomes. Using a bivariate probit model with selection and a dyadic data set on international crises experienced by 195 countries between 1950 and 2000, I find moderate-to-strong support for the hypotheses.

Numerous studies have used monadic or dyadic data to show that democracies are more likely to win wars. Poast (2010; Political Analysis 18(4): 403–425) demonstrates that the use of dyadic data to model events that are really multilateral (or k-adic) can bias the statistical results. In this article, I discuss the potential consequences of that bias for previous studies on democracy and war outcomes. Then I replicate some of those studies using modified, k-adic versions of the original datasets. Finally, I conduct an original analysis using the updated dataset on wars by Reiter et al. (2014a; Journal of Conflict Resolution; doi: 10.1177/0022002714553107). Overall, I find several changes when using k-adic data. Most significantly, the relationship between democracy and war outcomes appears to be strongest for states that join the war effort after it has already started.

Academia has become an increasingly common political target, particularly the institution of academic tenure, which many conservative politicians accuse of helping to perpetuate the ideological indoctrination of students. This study focuses on students' perceptions of professors' ideology by examining the link between student ideology, professor favorability, and perceptions of professors' ideology. We employ an original survey instrument and find that, rather than forming perceptions of their professors' political views based on their professors' actual positions, students tend to project their own ideology onto their professor, based on the extent to which they like their professor.

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