R. Karl Rethemeyer

University of Massachusetts Amherst | UMass Amherst · College of Social and Behavioral Sciences

Whom do states target with violent repression? While we know that states are more likely to repress threats to their rule, precisely who is threatening enough to warrant this response is less clear. To address this question, we focus on a set of actors who often bear the brunt of state force – ethnopolitical minority organizations – and argue that...

This study investigates the impact of global networks on e-government development and the role of political regime types in e-government diffusion through international networks. We built a unique social network dataset that covers 148 countries for the years between 2003 and 2014. Our network dataset is rooted in two assumptions: 1) international...

This chapter presents a theory to explain why insurgent organizations attack civilians. One of the main foci is embeddedness theory, which argues that social interactions between entities will have a major impact on the behavior of organizations. Drawing on this perspective and other theoretical building blocks, the chapter explores how the relatio...

Why do insurgent organizations sometimes attack civilians? This chapter begins hypothesis testing of the insurgent embeddedness argument with contingency tables, which suggest basic relationships between the main variables and attacking civilians. A variety of approaches are used to test the robustness of the findings related to the statistical ana...

This chapter summarizes key findings, including comparing results across the four main empirical chapters examining different types of civilian targeting. Of the seven variables used to measure the insurgent embeddedness argument, most are related to multiple varieties of civilian victimization: government coercion (“stick” tactics), interorganizat...

This chapter examines the factors that make organizations more likely to be rivals of one another. Given the relatively sparse nature of rivalry connections among insurgent organizations, network-based models of rivalry cannot be used for the analysis. The chapter thus reports descriptive data to examine these rivalries and uses logistic regression...

This chapter presents the data used to test hypotheses on civilian targeting by insurgent organizations. The chapter uses the Big, Allied, and Dangerous Version II data set, which is a yearly data set of insurgent organizations with data on their structure, behavior, and relations focusing on the years 1998–2012. The data set includes variables suc...

This chapter uses stochastic actor-oriented models to analyze the factors that shape the alliances that organizations form and keep with other insurgents. Given the assumption that insurgents will behave differently given different global environments, analyses are conducted for theoretically relevant periods: the pre-September 11, 2001 (9/11) atta...

This chapter applies the embeddedness argument to types of civilian targeting. It explores why some insurgent groups mostly attack the general public. In other words, it examines why some insurgent groups focus their attacks on civilians who are not government employees or symbols of institutions such as religious leaders or members of the news med...

This chapter focuses on the targeting of schools by insurgent organizations. The chapter focuses on this type of attack because it is one of the most heinous forms of violence that a militant group can commit—an important subset of civilian targeting. These types of attacks have not been the subject of much systematic research. Factors identified a...

This chapter discusses an understudied subset of civilian targeting: attacks on journalists. Violence against journalists is not simply violence against civilians but also a threat to communication and knowledge, including about governance and conflict. As with attacks against schools, given the relative rarity of such violence, it is somewhat diff...

SECTION I. Introduction, Theory, and Initial Testing Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. The Embeddedness Theory of Civilian Targeting by Insurgent Groups Chapter 3. Describing the BAAD2 Insurgency Data and Other Data Sources Chapter 4. Testing Primary Hypotheses SECTION II. Empirical Extensions: Types of Civilian Targeting Chapter 5. Why Do Some I...

Background Death from cardiovascular disease (CVD) has been a longstanding public health challenge in the US, whereas death from opioid use is a recent, growing public health crisis. While population-level approaches to reducing CVD risk are known to be effective in preventing CVD deaths, more targeted approaches in high-risk communities are known...

This paper explores the role of homophily with respect to demographic attributes on the formation of friendships, focusing on the moderating effect of attribute salience and time effect. To address the research questions, we explored a data set collected from Master of Public Administration (MPA) students in four waves over a period of nearly a yea...

Why do some insurgent organizations launch maritime attacks? To examine why organizations would engage in this behavior we draw on a new dataset of insurgencies to investigate the organizational characteristics associated with maritime attacks. We find that there are two types of maritime attacks by insurgencies. While both types of attacks are ass...

In fall 2016, a two-year grant was secured from AHRQ, to pilot a mobile Social Knowledge Networking (SKN) system on Electronic Health Record (EHR) Medication Reconciliation (MedRec), to enable Augusta University (AU) Health System, to progress from "limited-use" of EHR-MedRec technology, to "meaningful-use." The rationale is that an SKN system woul...

Similar to issues faced in health systems across USA, AU Health, based in Augusta, Georgia, faced a scenario of low physician engagement in, and limited-use of its Electronic Health Record (EHR) Medication Reconciliation (MedRec) technology, which translated to high rates of medication discrepancies and low accuracy of the patient's active medicati...

The 2007 U.S. National Institutes of Health EPR-3 guidelines emphasize the importance creating a provider-patient partnership to enable patients/families to monitor and take control of their asthma, so that treatment can be adjusted as needed. However, major shortfalls continue to be reported in provider adherence to EPR-3 guidelines. For providers...

Hating America – and targeting or killing Americans – at times seems like a mandatory activity for terrorists, yet only a small minority of known terrorist organizations target or attack American interests. Under what circumstances do terrorist organizations choose to target American citizens and interests? When do they actually commit such attacks...

Background In fall 2016, a 2-year grant was secured to pilot a Social Knowledge Networking (SKN) system pertaining to Electronic Health Record (EHR) Medication Reconciliation (MedRec), to enable Augusta University Health System to progress from “limited use” of EHR MedRec technology, to “meaningful use” (MU). A total of 50 “SKN users” (practitioner...

Background: Similar to issues faced in health systems across the USA, AU Health faced a scenario of low physician engagement in and limited use of its Electronic Health Record (EHR) Medication Reconciliation (MedRec) technology, which translated to high rates of medication discrepancies and low accuracy of the patient’s active medication list, duri...

Background: In an effort to reduce medication discrepancies during transitions of care and improve accuracy of the patient's medication list, AU Health conducted a study to identify a comprehensive set of issues related to electronic health record (EHR) medication reconciliation (MedRec) from the perspective of practitioners directly involved in t...

Insurgent organizations have become major players in criminal enterprises around the world. However, research examining why some participate in crime while others do not remains underdeveloped. Analyzing newly collected annual data on 140 insurgent groups from 1998 to 2012, we examine the conditions driving insurgents’ participation in drug crimes,...

How do conciliatory and coercive counterinsurgency tactics affect militant group violence against civilians? Scholars of civil war increasingly seek to understand intentional civilian targeting, often referred to as terrorism. Extant research emphasizes group weakness, or general state attributes such as regime type. We focus on terrorism as violen...

This study explores how policy funding context—defined as whether funding for a social service policy domain is discretionary or mandated—affects network structures in social service domains. We present comparative findings from two social service policy networks which differ with respect to funding context: A 47-actor adult basic education policy...

Background: In fall 2016, Augusta University received a two-year grant from AHRQ, to implement a Social Knowledge Networking (SKN) system for enabling its health system, AU-Health, to progress from "limited use" of EHR Medication Reconciliation (MedRec) Technology, to "meaningful use." Phase 1 sought to identify a comprehensive set of issues relat...

This article offers an overview of the conceptual, substantive, and practical issues surrounding “big data” to provide one perspective on how the field of public affairs can successfully cope with the big data revolution. Big data in public affairs refers to a combination of administrative data collected through traditional means and large-scale da...

In April 1984, 25 members of the Jewish Underground were arrested by the Israeli General Security Service moments after they had planted explosives in five Palestinian-owned buses. Their arrest and sentencing brought to an end one of the more sophisticated expressions of Jewish terrorism since the birth of Israel. Overall, the group planned four op...

At the Children’s Hospital of Georgia (CHOG), we found outpatient “revisits” for pediatric asthma to be significantly above national norms. According to the NIH, costly hospital revisits for asthma can be prevented through guideline-based self-management of asthma, central to which, is the use of a written Asthma Action Plan (AAP) developed jointly...

This study explores how public service motivation (PSM) develops as a dynamic trait (Perry and Wise 1990), focusing on the impact of social networks. Despite the importance of PSM socialization mechanism (Kjeldsen and Jacobsen forthcoming), few studies have assessed the role of social networks in building PSM, and certainly none have considered the...

Background: The problem of interest in this study is the challenge of consistent implementation of evidence-based infection prevention practices at the unit level, a challenge broadly characterized as "change implementation failure." The theoretical literature suggests that periodic top-down communications promoting tacit knowledge exchanges acros...

Many hospitals are unable to consistently implement evidence-based practices. For example, implementation of the central line bundle (CLB), known to prevent catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSIs) is often challenging. This problem is broadly characterized as “change implementation failure.” Theoretical literature has suggested that period...

Using stochastic methods we illustrate that the Provisional Irish Republican Army's (PIRA) network is clustered along three primary dimensions: (a) brigade affiliation, (b) whether the member participated in violent activities, and (c) task/role within PIRA. While most brigades tended to foster connections within the brigade (that is, “closure”), t...

We generalize a form of two-mode network analysis to make it applicable to a cases-by-variables data format, and apply our approach for the study of terrorist group engagement in the drug trade, emphasizing the implications of our approach for policy in a study of 395 terrorist organizations. Based on the organizations’ levels of resources, network...

Many hospitals are unable to successfully implement evidence-based practices. For example, implementation of the central line bundle (CLB), proven to prevent catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSIs), is often challenging. This problem is broadly characterized as a "change implementation failure." A prospective study was conducted in 2 inten...

This paper presents an analysis of the Provisional Irish Republican Army's (PIRA) brigade level behavior during the Northern Ireland Conflict (1970-1998) and identifies the organizational factors that impact a brigade's lethality as measured via terrorist attacks. Key independent variables include levels of technical expertise, cadre age, counter-t...

This paper presents an analysis of the Provisional Irish Republican Army's (PIRA) brigade level behavior during the Northern Ireland Conflict (1970-1998) and identifies the organizational factors that impact a brigade's lethality as measured via terrorist attacks. Key independent variables include levels of technical expertise, cadre age, counter-t...

Many hospitals are unable to successfully implement evidence-based practices. For example, implementation of the central line bundle (CLB), known to prevent catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSIs) is often challenging. This problem is broadly characterized as “change implementation failure.” The theoretical literature on organizational cha...

Over the past half century, an increasing number of network alliances between multiple entities across sectors (i.e. public agencies, legislative offices, non-governmental organizations, and private sector organizations) have limited the power of governments and created collaborative spaces in the processes of social service policy decisionmaking a...

Though many polities have adopted collaborative approaches to policy decision processes, few cross-national comparative studies exist. To fill that gap the article presents a comparative study of the US and Korea, posing this question: to what extent are differences in the structure of Korean and US policy networks explained by differences in polit...

Many hospitals are unable to consistently implement evidence-based practices. For example, implementation of the central line bundle (CLB), known to prevent catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSIs), is often challenging. This problem is broadly characterized as "change implementation failure." The theoretical literature on organizational ch...

This article offers a scholarly review and perspective on the potential of "implementation research" to generate incremental, context-sensitive, evidence-based management strategies for the successful implementation of evidence-based practices (EBPs) (such as the "central line bundle"). Many hospitals have difficulty consistently implementing EBPs...

Distinctive combinations of attributes and behaviors lead us to improve on existing representations of terrorist organizations within a space of group properties. We review and extend a four-step procedure that discovers (statistical) interaction effects among relevant variables based on clusters of organizations derived from group properties. Appl...

Despite plentiful scholarship relating to the prospect of terrorists utilizing chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons, little of this work is both quantitative in nature and global in scope. Leveraging open-source data, this study quantitatively explores factors influencing the terrorist organizational decision to pursue CBRN...

How do public agencies integrate new employees and shape their learning process? How do newcomers’ connections, formed with experienced professionals, help them “learn the ropes”? Public managers may find themselves asking such questions as they employ tactics to transition newcomers into productive organizational members who fit in well. At the sa...

This study investigates the pattern of social interaction and integration among 31 faculty members and 84 master’s students who enrolled in a cohort-wide core course, PAD 507: Professional Applications I, offered by the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany–SUNY during the Fall 2007 semester. A primary goal of the c...

While the majority of quantitative terrorism research has emerged since September 11th (Silke 2004), one area that has long been the subject of quantitative analysis is international or transnational terrorism (Silke 2004) (Plümper and Neumayer 2010) (Enders and Sandler 2006). While there has been a great deal of work examining where transnational...

No single profile fits all CBRN-active groups, and therefore it is important to identify multiple profiles. In the analysis of terrorist organizations, linear and generalized regression modeling provide a set of tools to apply to data that is in the form of cases (named groups) by variables (traits and behaviors of the groups). We turn the conventi...

This article examines the road that network scholarship has followed in Public Administration. We look at the historical drivers of the use of networks in practice and scholarship in the field and discuss how that has shaped the current literature. The body of the article focuses on the current challenges that network scholars face in the disciplin...

Why do terrorist organizations ally with one another? To answer this question, we use data from the Big Allied and Dangerous (BAAD) Version 1.0 dataset to estimate an exponential random graph (ERGM) model of terrorist organizational ties. Our analysis focuses on 14 hypotheses that are drawn broadly from the organizational, network, social movements...

This study investigates the pattern of social interaction and integration among 31 faculty members and 84 master's students who enrolled in a cohort-wide core course, PAD 507: Professional Applications I, offered by the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany—SUNY during the Fall 2007 semester. A primary goal of the c...

This study seeks to gain a baseline understanding of the communication network structure, content of communication, and outcomes in a medical intensive care unit experiencing higher-than-expected central line blood stream infection (CLBSI) rates. The communication network structure refers to the direction and frequency of communication on evidence-...

The prospects of politically violent non-state actors utilizing chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapons has captured the imaginations of not only public officials and the news media, but also a sizeable group of scholars who have sought to better define and characterize this apparent threat. Yet little of this work is quantitat...

This article investigates the role of resource dependence in explaining the social structure of policy networks while controlling for the effects of microstructure, such as the tendency for networks to display reciprocity andor transitive closure. While previous studies have analyzed resource dependence as a factor in decision making in policy netw...

What factors may lead a terrorist organization to attack undefended and unaware civilians—or as we style them, “soft targets”? We examine two distinct processes in choosing to attack soft targets: the one-time decision to begin attacking soft targets and the continued use of violence against such targets. Our analysis points to ideology—specificall...

Networks, collaboration, and shared governance are key components of the twenty-first-century research program for public management scholars. This critique examines five key challenges for the field: modeling politics in collaboration, identifying central competencies that government must retain, the "e-limits" to collaboration, creating a multise...

In this paper, we present a holistic, integrated social science analysis of the leading indicators of WMD terrorism that advances what is known about the social conditions that foster WMD terrorism. This exercise illustrates how a multidisciplinary team of researchers, including political scientists, anthropologists and computer engineers combined...

While there has been a great deal of work on networks and their impact on governance, government and social movements, until the attacks against the United States in 2001 very few studies focused on what Raab and Milward call “Dark Networks” (2003). The attack on the United States illustrated how effectively tactical and strategic networks can expl...

What holds a policy network together? Our previous work on policy networks and “network systems” (Rethemeyer 2005; 2007a,b; Rethemeyer and Hatmaker 2008) suggests that personal social capital, organizational social capital, and resource dependence are complementary bases for cohesion in policy networks. In this article we take up the challenge issu...

Although policy and collaborative networks have been studied since the 1970s and 1980s, only recently has the management of these entities come under greater scrutiny. Studies of “network management” are designed to better understand the unique challenges of operating in a context where bureaucracy no longer provides the primary tool for “social st...

Why do some terrorist organizations choose not to—or fail to—kill? Of the 395 terrorist organizations operating between 1998 and 2005 only 39% had actually killed anyone. What factors account for this outcome? This article examines a series of organizational factors, including ideology, capability, and “home-base” country context, that the literatu...

The article discusses how newly hired workers acclimate to an organization, and ways in which organizations attempt to help with their organizational socialization. The social networking aspect is emphasized, focusing on employees' efforts to acquire information and resources. Examples are cited from a longitudinal study of workers at the New York...

Why are some terrorist organizations so much more deadly then others? This article examines organizational characteristics such as ideology, size, age, state sponsorship, alliance connections, and control of territory while controlling for factors that may also influence lethality, including the political system and relative wealth of the country i...

The article discusses the things that hold a policy network together and make it cohesive. While bureaucracies are held together by legal authority rooted in hierarchy, networks lack these things. Instead, they must remain cohesive through trust and mutual dependence. The authors examine the dynamics between individual and organizational social cap...

Although many policy and political scientists have studied the Internet's role in electoral and organizational processes, there is little work that examines the Internet's effect on policy processes. Has the Internet tended to make policy deliberations more inclusive? Has it affected patterns of influence reputation among network participants? Has...

For at least a decade, scholars have sought ways to remedy citizen dissatisfaction with representative democracy. Recently, the development and deployment of the Internet has been heralded as a technical solution to this problem. Observers often base their optimism on analysis of the Internet’s impact on elections and public comment processes. Yet...

Does doctoral preparation in quantitative methods adequately prepare students to interact with the public affairs literature? Does the curriculum meet previously expressed ideals? Are incoming students prepared to complete this curriculum successfully? We present findings from a survey of 44 leading public affairs doctoral programs. Although almost...

For at least forty years political and policy scientists have been striving to create a conceptualization of policy and political processes that frankly acknowledges the role of public agencies and private organizations in policymaking. In recent years scholars have often referred to these social structures as "policy networks." While policy networ...

Walter J.M. Kickert, Erik-Hans Klijn, and Joop F. M. Koppenjan, eds., Managing Complex Networks: Strategies for the Public Sector (London: Sage Publications, 1997). 206pp., $41.95 paper, ISBN: 0-7619-5548-8.Myrna P. Mandell, ed., Getting Results through Collaboration: Networks and Network Structures for Public Policy and Management (Westport, CT: Q...

In the past decade, the nature of fathers' involvement with their children and families has become an important topic, with government agencies and nonprofit groups developing programs to help men manage the challenges of fatherhood. This report presents the first set of findings from the Bay Area Fathering Indicators Data System (BAyFIDS) Project,...

Granted by the Committee on HIgher Degrees in Public Policy. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 2002. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 327-352).