June 2023
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26 Reads
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1 Citation
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Publications (14)
June 2023
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121 Reads
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14 Citations
January 2023
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23 Reads
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1 Citation
Science
January 2023
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17 Reads
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1 Citation
October 2021
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112 Reads
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30 Citations
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Significance Violent extremist groups such as the Islamic State and Boko Haram have proliferated across the world in recent decades. While considerable scholarship addresses why people join violent extremist groups, much less attention has been paid to how former members reenter society. Yet successfully ending conflict requires reluctant communities to accept former members back home. In this research, we find that radio messages delivered by trusted authorities in Nigeria lead to large, positive changes in people’s willingness to accept former Boko Haram fighters back home and make people think their neighbors are more in favor of reintegration. Our results show that messages from leaders can create change on a mass scale at low cost, helping to end conflict and division.
May 2021
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68 Reads
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26 Citations
The Journal of Politics
January 2021
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107 Reads
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72 Citations
American Political Science Association
Scholars of the resource curse argue that reliance on primary commodities destabilizes governments: price fluctuations generate windfalls or periods of austerity that provoke or intensify civil conflict. Over 350 quantitative studies test this claim, but prominent results point in different directions, making it difficult to discern which results reliably hold across contexts. We conduct a meta-analysis of 46 natural experiments that use difference-in-difference designs to estimate the causal effect of commodity price changes on armed civil conflict. We show that commodity price changes, on average, do not change the likelihood of conflict. However, there are cross-cutting effects by commodity type. In line with theory, we find price increases for labor-intensive agricultural commodities reduce conflict, while increases in the price of oil, a capital-intensive commodity, provoke conflict. We also find that price increases for lootable artisanal minerals provoke conflict. Our meta-analysis consolidates existing evidence, but also highlights opportunities for future research.
August 2020
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539 Reads
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187 Citations
American Political Science Association
Eliciting honest answers to sensitive questions is frustrated if subjects withhold the truth for fear that others will judge or punish them. The resulting bias is commonly referred to as social desirability bias, a subset of what we label sensitivity bias. We make three contributions. First, we propose a social reference theory of sensitivity bias to structure expectations about survey responses on sensitive topics. Second, we explore the bias-variance trade-off inherent in the choice between direct and indirect measurement technologies. Third, to estimate the extent of sensitivity bias, we meta-analyze the set of published and unpublished list experiments (a.k.a., the item count technique) conducted to date and compare the results with direct questions. We find that sensitivity biases are typically smaller than 10 percentage points and in some domains are approximately zero.
May 2019
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355 Reads
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92 Citations
American Political Science Association
Researchers need to select high-quality research designs and communicate those designs clearly to readers. Both tasks are difficult. We provide a framework for formally “declaring” the analytically relevant features of a research design in a demonstrably complete manner, with applications to qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research. The approach to design declaration we describe requires defining a model of the world ( M ), an inquiry ( I ), a data strategy ( D ), and an answer strategy ( A ). Declaration of these features in code provides sufficient information for researchers and readers to use Monte Carlo techniques to diagnose properties such as power, bias, accuracy of qualitative causal inferences, and other “diagnosands.” Ex ante declarations can be used to improve designs and facilitate preregistration, analysis, and reconciliation of intended and actual analyses. Ex post declarations are useful for describing, sharing, reanalyzing, and critiquing existing designs. We provide open-source software, DeclareDesign, to implement the proposed approach.
May 2019
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62 Reads
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47 Citations
Political Analysis
Measurement error threatens the validity of survey research, especially when studying sensitive questions. Although list experiments can help discourage deliberate misreporting, they may also suffer from nonstrategic measurement error due to flawed implementation and respondents’ inattention. Such error runs against the assumptions of the standard maximum likelihood regression ( MLreg ) estimator for list experiments and can result in misleading inferences, especially when the underlying sensitive trait is rare. We address this problem by providing new tools for diagnosing and mitigating measurement error in list experiments. First, we demonstrate that the nonlinear least squares regression ( NLSreg ) estimator proposed in Imai (2011) is robust to nonstrategic measurement error. Second, we offer a general model misspecification test to gauge the divergence of the MLreg and NLSreg estimates. Third, we show how to model measurement error directly, proposing new estimators that preserve the statistical efficiency of MLreg while improving robustness. Last, we revisit empirical studies shown to exhibit nonstrategic measurement error, and demonstrate that our tools readily diagnose and mitigate the bias. We conclude this article with a number of practical recommendations for applied researchers. The proposed methods are implemented through an open-source software package.
Citations (10)
... In the calculation made by taking α = .05 into account for the quantitative part of the study, if ± > 205 teachers are reached, the sample represents the population (Blair et al., 2023). Accordingly, science teachers in the study population were included in the study by stratified sampling and random sampling technique [Stratification Coefficient: 438/205 = 0.468037;Karatay: ± 66,Meram: ± 67,Selçuklu: ± 74]. ...
- Citing Book
June 2023
... Therefore, factors that shape the credibility of ex-terrorists' public statements deserve examination. For example, research by Blair et al. (2021) in Maiduguri, Nigeria, showed that messages delivered by religious leaders zooming in on the importance of reconciliation between ex-terrorists and community members enhanced public support for the reintegration of ex-Boko Haram fighters. Similarly, in Canada and the U.S., Belanger and Szmania (2018) suggested that counterterrorism messages by nongovernment actors (e.g., religious leaders), rather than government actors, met with greater public acceptance. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
October 2021
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
... Recurring conflict in the region in countries such as Burkina Faso (Africa Center for Strategic Studies, 2023), the Democratic Republic of Congo (Venugopalan, 2016), South Sudan (Afriyie et al., 2020), Nigeria (Ajala, 2020;Dorff et al., 2020), and more recent armed conflict events in Ethiopia (Nyadera & Osedo, 2023) and Sudan (Ahmed, 2023), among several other conflicts in the region, have had a profound impact on development efforts. They retard both domestic and foreign direct investment (Blair et al., 2022), reduce economic growth (Le et al., 2022), and cause tourists to seek out safer destinations (Khalid et al., 2020). Conflicts also lead to increases in the debt burden of African economies (Nikolaidou & Okwoche, 2023;Okwoche & Nikolaidou, 2024) and can even constrain their fiscal responses (Okwoche & Iheonu, 2021). ...
- Citing Article
May 2021
The Journal of Politics
... These findings contribute to the literature on conflict and natural resources, aligning, e.g., withFetzer and Marden (2017) andBlair et al. (2021) in suggesting that the degree of contestability of a resource -which should be moderated by local state presence -influences when and where conflict occurs. Furthermore, our findings can potentially explain why oil has been found to promote conflict in specific contexts(Dube and Vargas, 2013;Nwokolo, 2018), but not in cross-country panel regression studies(Bazzi and Blattman, 2014;Cotet and Tsui, 2013). ...
- Citing Article
January 2021
American Political Science Association
... Survey researchers go to great lengths to reduce social desirability bias and avoid traumatizing respondents when asking "sensitive" questions to ensure accurate responses. Despite recognition that sensitivity bias will vary considerably across topics and contexts (Blair et al. 2020;Andreenkova and Javeline 2018;Rosenfeld et al. 2016), much of the focus in comparative politics remains on a subset of known sensitive questions: including corruption (Brierley 2020), support for (Kramon and Weghorst 2019) and exposure to political violence (Jaffe et al. 2015;Brück et al. 2016) as well as support for democracy (Panel 2019) and evaluations of authoritarian regimes (Tannenberg 2022). ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
August 2020
American Political Science Association
... Several DSLs [3,37], software packages [4,40], and standalone applications [15,27] specialize in experiment design. A primary focus is to provide researchers low-level control over trial-level and randomization details. ...
Reference:
PLanet: Formalizing Experimental Design
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
May 2019
American Political Science Association
... We include state of residence in each model as an indicator variable, thereby imposing the same age relationship in each of the two states (except for a state-ofresidence level shift). We use a linear estimator because, although it is less efficient than a maximum likelihood estimator, it has reduced bias when incidence is low (Ahlquist, 2018;Blair et al., 2019). Because we are using a linear regression, the coefficient multiplied by 100 represents the percentage-point change in abortion incidence with a one unit increase in the predictor variable. ...
- Citing Article
May 2019
Political Analysis
... Social norms are characterized as beliefs that are collectively shared regarding what is considered typical or concerning what is expected behavior within a group, which guide individuals' behaviors. It provided a framework for understanding a variety of behaviors, including encouraging energy conservation [9], charitable donations [10], and health decisions [11]. Cultural tightness was introduced by Gelfand et al [12] to measure the degree of adherence to norms within a country (or a state within a country) as well as the level of tolerance for individuals who deviate from these norms. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
March 2019
Science Advances
... Several longitudinal and experimental studies in other contexts have found that perceived norms at an earlier time point influence later personal behavior [109][110][111][112][113] and that changing norm perceptions leads to changes in behavior and attitude. 45,48,51,52,[114][115][116][117][118][119][120] Future research is needed to address these questions. For example, future studies on this topic should attempt to collect objective measures of water treatment practices, for example, within a typical week. ...
- Citing Article
January 2017
SSRN Electronic Journal
... Voice data collection serves a simple, yet extremely effective countermeasure against data fabrication. Recording audio during an in person study conducted by a research assistant can provide many benefits (Gomila et al., 2017;Harrison & Krauss, 2002). The issue of data fabrication has become increasingly concerning, as research assistants or surveyors may submit data that was not in fact collected, but rather completely or partially created for efficiency or incentive reasons. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
June 2017
Social Psychological and Personality Science
