Recent research in the civil war literature has focused on how and when external actors intervene. However, to date, systematic data have not existed on diplomatic efforts in conflict management. This article fills this gap and introduces a dataset on 438 diplomatic interventions in 68 conflicts stretching from 1945 to 1999. The authors briefly outline previous research on third-party interventions in civil wars, describe the dataset in some detail, including some initial patterns in the data, and describe how this dataset contributes to research into conflict processes. The authors also demonstrate how diplomatic interventions can be incorporated into other research agendas by merging this dataset with Doyle & Sambanis's peacekeeping data and replicating their analysis to examine the role of external diplomacy on peacebuilding success. These data on interventions, moreover, can be merged with commonly used datasets on intrastate conflicts, which promises a wide range of application in civil war studies. Developing a greater understanding of when and how civil wars end, scholarship needs to take into account efforts to arrive at diplomatic solutions. And if, as the results demonstrate, externally driven diplomacy facilitates the termination of civil wars, then the policy implications are quite important.

Since the advent of the Internet, right-wing extremists and those who subscribe to extreme right views have exploited online platforms to build a collective identity among the like-minded. Research in this area has largely focused on extremists’ use of websites, forums, and mainstream social media sites, but overlooked in this research has been an exploration of the popular social news aggregation site Reddit. The current study explores the role of Reddit’s unique voting algorithm in facilitating “othering” discourse and, by extension, collective identity formation among members of a notoriously hateful subreddit community, r/The_Donald. The results of the thematic analysis indicate that those who post extreme-right content on r/The_Donald use Reddit’s voting algorithm as a tool to mobilize like-minded members by promoting extreme discourses against two prominent out-groups: Muslims and the Left. Overall, r/The_Donald’s “sense of community” facilitates identity work among its members by creating an environment wherein extreme right views are continuously validated.

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The journey-to-crime literature consistently shows that the distance to crime is short, particularly for violent crimes. Recent research has revealed methodological concerns regarding various (improper) groupings of data (nesting effects). In this article we investigate one such nesting effect: the relationship between age and the distance to crime. Contrary to much of the research that investigates this phenomenon, using a large incident-based data set of more than 100,000 crime trips, we find that the relationship between age and the distance to crime is best described as quadratic but this quadratic relationship is not universal across all crime classifications.

Many contentious elections end in disputes about alleged fraud, irregularities, and malpractices. How do we know when these claims are valid and when they are false complaints from sore losers? This article describes a new dataset developed by the Electoral Integrity Project. Based on a survey of election experts, the research provides new evidence to compare how national contests around the world are meeting international standards of electoral integrity. The questionnaire includes 49 key indicators clustered into 11 stages of the electoral cycle, as well as generating an overall summary Perception of Electoral Integrity (PEI) 100-point index. The evidence displays high levels of external validity, internal validity, and legitimacy. The PEI datasets allow researchers to gauge the perceived quality of elections worldwide. This study summarizes the PEI’s research design, compares the quality of elections around the globe, and illustrates how electoral integrity is linked with both democracy and development

In recent years, far too many elections have ended with the major protagonists at loggerheads over bitterly disputed results and with conflict spilling onto the streets. Cries of fraud are heard frequently, especially among the losers in tight winner-take-all presidential races. Protests challenging election outcomes have broken out in locales as diverse as Caracas, Harare, Kabul, and Kuala Lumpur. Accusations of vote rigging are particularly common in countries whose histories of electoral malpractice-vote buying in Mexico, media bias in Russia, or intercommunal violence in Nigeria, for example-have weakened the public's confidence in the integrity of elections. Even established democracies are not immune to electoral controversy: After questions were raised about the 2012 U.S. elections, a new bipartisan presidential commission was set up to explore ways of strengthening election administration in that country. 1 So there is reason to be concerned not only about disputed elections that make headlines and have far-reaching and sometimes deadly consequences. Even in countries where election results are generally accepted both at home and abroad, the quality of the contests may vary in significant ways. How do we determine whether or not an election has met international standards, let alone assess its overall quality? This is a pressing issue for practitioners, who not only must make such determinations but must decide, based on the evidence, what types of interventions would most effectively improve elections in a particular country facing a par

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This article introduces two new datasets produced by the Institutions and Elections Project.Those datasets contain nuanced information describing the political institutions, the constitutional and practical arrangements in governments, and every national election for every country in the international system between 1972 and 2005.We believe the 127 variables in these data represent a significant contribution to research programs in comparative and world politics interested in the nuances of domestic politics.