Soon after the Israeli-U.S. war in Iran began on Feb. 28, 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump called upon NATO allies to help support the effort. The response of European leaders was at first mixed. Some, like the United Kingdom, offering limited or qualified support. Others — chief among them Spain — refused to assist the U.S. at all.

NATO members’ opposition to getting involved with the conflict hardened further after the alliance decided to sit out the subsequent U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

The extent of the division between Washington and other members is such that European leaders have quietly begun considering a plan B should Trump make good on his threats to pull out of NATO altogether.

As experts on foreign policy, overseas military bases and security cooperation, we believe that even though historical tensions within NATO are not new, the recent divisions nonetheless pose a major challenge for the long-term viability of the alliance, particularly in an increasingly fragile U.S.-led international order.

The divisions that preceded Iran

Beyond the recent disagreements over Iran, 2026 has also seen the possibility of conflict between NATO members themselves.

In January, long-standing Trump designs over Greenland seemed closer than ever, with the U.S. verbally, at least, suggesting it was prepared to use economic and military coercion to acquire the territory from Denmark, a NATO ally. Despite tensions having since subsided, Denmark has released unprecedented details about how it prepared to defend against military action by its longtime ally.

While the extent of the Trump-originated rifts are new, NATO member nations disagreeing – sometimes vociferously – is not.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, when the U.S. was embroiled in the Vietnam War, members of Congress called on NATO members to contribute more to their own defense. Those were demands that the first Trump administration would later repeat.

In 2003, the U.S. push to invade Iraq also divided NATO. While some members, like the U.K. and Poland, joined the U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq, others, such as France and Germany, opposed the invasion. Turkey, another NATO member, notably denied the U.S. use of bases in its territory in the lead-up to the campaign.

The increasing tensions led the NATO secretary-general at the time, George Robertson of Britain, to downplay the growing divide and assure the world that NATO members still supported the United States.

NATO countries have even come close to war with each other in the past. Most notably, Turkey and Greece came to blows several times, usually over their still-unresolved territorial conflict over Cyprus in the Mediterranean.

NATO’s evolving mission

Reducing tensions among European nations was always part of the NATO project. With the two world wars driven in large part by French-German rivalry, reducing intra-alliance conflict was central to NATO’s purpose. The first secretary-general of NATO, Lord Lionel Hastings Ismay, famously described NATO as aimed at “keeping the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.”

With the fall of the Soviet Union, one of NATO’s core pillars collapsed.

In the 1990s, the organization’s mission shifted from an anti-Russian defense pact to promoting European regional security. During this period, NATO took part in conflicts in the Balkans from 1992 to 1999. It still maintains a peacekeeping presence there.

In 2001, when launching its war against Afghanistan, the U.S. invoked Article V, NATO’s collective defense clause, for the first and, to date, only time. This led NATO member nations to become militarily active well beyond Europe’s borders, including operations in Pakistan, the coast of Africa, Libya and Iraq.

The 1990s and early 2000s also saw NATO expand to include several former Soviet republics, a move that Russia opposed as hostile to its interests. In fact, post-Cold War NATO expansion into East Europe has long been one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chief grievances against U.S. foreign policy in Europe.

The Russian invasions of Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine in 2022 led to a renewed focus on Russia and Europe’s eastern borders, with NATO member nations coordinating on sanctions and military aid in support of Ukraine’s government. The war also led to another round of expansion, with Finland joining the alliance in 2023 and Sweden in 2024.

Trump’s opposition to NATO

While NATO has grown and its mission focus has changed over time, the Trump administration’s call to action against Iran is not an obvious extension of the organization’s evolved focus.

The war is geographically removed from Europe, and Trump has largely been unsuccessful in making the case for why Iran posed an imminent threat to NATO nations. The United States’ motivations and war aims also remain unclear and have been prone to change.

European countries largely agree on issues like preventing Iran from pursuing an unlimited nuclear program. But they have long preferred diplomatic initiatives – like the 2015 nuclear accord deal with Iran brokered during the Obama Administration – to military strikes.

Part of the disconnect now is how the U.S. under Trump views multilateral institutions compared with his predecessors. While past U.S. presidents have viewed NATO as an extension of the United States’ global interests, they also tended to value the alliance as a whole, despite Washington not always getting its preferred outcomes from it. For Trump, it is far more transactional.

Indeed, the Trump administration has framed the lack of support from NATO nations as evidence of the alliance’s decreased utility to the U.S.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently echoed that position, questioning the use of the alliance after several NATO members refused to allow the U.S. to use their airspace to conduct military operations in Iran.

During his first term, Trump also openly questioned NATO’s purpose. And he has repeatedly pressured allies to increase their defense spending, suggesting that allies were cheating the U.S. by an overreliance on American military strength.

The specter of unintended consequences

Even before Trump’s threats during his second term, Europe had already decided to change course. After the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the increasing fragility of the United States’ involvement in NATO, European countries began increasing military spending; NATO allies have also set targets for further increases in the coming years.

Germany aims to increase its military personnel by 50% in the next 10 years, and it has created its first permanent military deployment abroad – in Lithuania – since World War II. France has likewise announced plans to expand its nuclear arsenal and use it for extended deterrence for the rest of Europe.

Ironically, more spending may increase the chance of tensions between the Trump administration and NATO members.

Over time, the U.S. has reaped some benefits when allies spend less on their own defense. That’s because the U.S. has historically provided security guarantees for countries in exchange for more say over their foreign policies – something scholars refer to as the security–autonomy trade-off.

However, as the U.S. moves further away from a shared vision with European countries and U.S. policy becomes more volatile, American security guarantees may be less reliable in the eyes of many Europeans. Increased European defense budgets will therefore mean NATO members have more opportunities to assert their preferences against those of the U.S.

A changing role for NATO?

The world for the past 80 years has been characterized largely by U.S. political and military dominance. While it is clear that that world is changing, it is less clear what will replace it.

But understanding NATO’s history and its possible paths forward can give us some clues as to what that world will look like. And contrary to Trump’s short-term aims in nudging NATO allies to rebuild their militaries, a more powerful Europe likely means less U.S. influence in the long term, not more.

Michael A. Allen, Professor of Political Science, Boise State University; Carla Martinez Machain, Professor of Political Science, University at Buffalo, and Michael E. Flynn, Professor of Political Science, Kansas State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Before I move on I’ll note that this is an abbreviated version of a longer post from my personal blog. You can read the full post here. If you really want to dig into the code and the resulting figures I’d suggest going over there to see it. I’m trying to get back to posting here at the Quantitative Peace more regularly, so I’ll put some of the substantive front-end subject matter here. But WordPress isn’t great for the code chunks and execution, so I’ll leave that stuff for the other blog page. Please excuse some of the residual formatting issues leftover from Quarto.

The goal of this post is to help readers to understand how to fit a Bradley-Terry model for pairwise comparison data using the {brms} package in R. Bradley-Terry models are useful for generating rankings of players, groups, teams, etc., in cases where users might be interested in some kind of underlying latent attribute or characteristic. For example, we might be interested in generating a latent measure of a team’s skill, or someone’s knowledge of a certain topic. Bradley-Terry models are particularly useful when we have data on pairwise comparisons, such as win/loss data from sports matches, or preference data from surveys.

Below I’ll provide a brief overview of Bradley-Terry Models, what they are, why we might use them, and why we might want to fit one using {brms}, specifically. Then I’ll walk through a simple example of how to fit a Bradley-Terry model using {brms} in R.

What are Bradley-Terry Models?

I’m not intending to provide a comprehensive history of the subject, but it’s maybe worth discussing the development of these models a little bit. Bradley–Terry models, as a broad class of models, generally trace their roots to Bradley and Terry’s (1952) Rank Analysis of Incomplete Block Designs: The Method of Paired Comparisons. I say “as a broad class of models” because there are a number of different approaches to dealing with paired comparisons, which, according to Bradley and Terry’s own article, go back to at least the 1920s.

These models are generally focused primarily on two goals. First, what is the probability that a given item (e.g. item $i$) ranks higher than, or “wins”, when compared with another item (e.g. item $j$) in a paired comparison? The second goal is to estimate the “rank” of individual items in relation to one another—essentially a latent dimension.

You can see the two components in the equation above. The left-hand side of the equation shows the first use—the probability that $i$ beats $j$. The right-hand side shows the second part, which essentially represents the latent traits or characteristics of item $i$ and item $j$.

These models have a wide range of uses. If you’re new to these and do a quick search you’ll probably stumble on something that uses team sports as an example. For example, what’s the probability that a given soccer team, football team, baseball team, etc., is going to win a given match? We might also be interested in assessing more general latent traits, like a team’s overall “skill” level, by looking at the performance of teams over a given season and using individual matches along with corresponding wins/losses/ties as the basis for the paired comparisons.

It’s worth noting that we’re not limited to these applications, and the paired comparisons framework can be used to address lots of different problems. Interestingly, @Guttman1946 uses a more policy-relevant issue of scoring US Army demobilization score cards at the end of World War II as a motivating example. The central issue was how to weight five different factors on a survey sent to US soldiers that would determine their order or priority for demobilization and discharge from the armed services.

In this example, the specific factors in question were 1) length of time in the Army, 2) the amount of time spent overseas, 3) the amount of combat experience, 4) the soldier’s age, and 5) the number of children the soldier had. I don’t intend to go into a lot of depth on this particular paper, but it’s especially interesting because it sounds like soldiers ultimately didn’t like making paired comparisons between these individual attributes in isolation of the others because they felt that the omitted information was potentially vital to their decision. In this case, the paired comparisons become multidimensional, and the solution looks an awful lot like a conjoint experiment that we’d see used today to compare the influence of different individual variables when presented in combination with one another.

Another area where there is variation in approaches is how to handle ties. Earlier versions of these models (like @Guttman1946) typically assume away the presence of equivalent judgments, or ties. That’s fine, but sometimes we might care about cases where teams are tied, evaluators are ambivalent between two choices, etc. Later work by @Davidson1970 provides one method for dealing with this. This is also something I’ll address below briefly, but just be aware that there are options here.

Why Would We Use Them?

As with other cases where we might want to compare individuals, items, teams, etc., there are some problems with some of the more basic methods of comparison.

When comparing teams, for example, wins and losses can be potentially misleading if one team has an easier schedule than another. Comparing cumulative scores might also give an inaccurate picture of team performance if teams are competing under more difficult conditions than others (like bad weather or muddy fields).

Similarly, individuals’ test scores might not be a reliable way to evaluate intelligence or ability. Individual test takers can arrive at a comparable or identical score through a wide range of different pathways. Two students might both receive an A grade on an exam with one student missing a mixture of difficult and easy questions and the other missing only the most difficult. There may be good reasons for not wanting to treat these cases as equivalent.

Given the problems with “simpler” alternatives, researchers have developed a range of options for estimating the underlying trait of interest. Education and Psychology for example have developed a variety of different models under the banner of Item Response Theory (IRT) to do just this. These models let us take observational data, which might be complex and difficult to evaluate using simpler methods, and estimate underlying traits of interest using some fairly simple methods.

Estimating Paired Comparisons

Existing Packages and Approaches

There are a number of websites and packages that you can use to estimate Bradley–Terry models. The BradleyTerry2 package is a great starting point for anyone interested in tinkering with these models. Andrew Mack also provides a walk through for how to write up your own Bradley-Terry model. These are both great places to start if you’re looking to familiarize yourself with the models and how they work under the hood.

There are also some useful alternatives to be aware of. The {bpcs} package (which stands for Bayesian Paired Comparison) uses Stan as a backend to estimate paired comparisons. It provides users with a range of options for things like how to handle ties, modeling home advantage, etc.

Why would you choose one package over the other? The Bayesian option is useful because we’re often interested in estimating latent attributes, like skill or knowledge, for the various items or players in our data. Traditionally these models have been estimated using maximum likelihood, but this approach can have limitations in certain contexts.

Mattos and Silva Ramos, the creators of the {bpcs} package, provide a nice overview of the advantages of the Bayesian approach. For example, in some cases the maximum likelihood estimate isn’t available and models won’t converge. Sometimes this can arise as a result of not having connectivity between individual units through overlapping pairings. Packages like {BradleyTerry2} will also produce latent estimates without corresponding estimates of uncertainty, as you can see in @tbl-bt-example-1. The Bayesian approach, on the other hand, provides users with posterior distributions for each individual unit, which can be converted into point estimates, used to generate credible intervals, or sampled for downstream analyses.

Takeaway

You can look over at my personal blog for more info if you’d like to dig deeper, but I’ll leave this post here for now because the rest gets more densely populated with code and examples. So go check it out!

The post Bradley–Terry Models and Pairwise Comparisons in brms appeared first on The Quantitative Peace.

The Quantitative Peace has been dormant for about five years. Part of this dormancy was due to backend issues beyond my expertise. While I could troubleshoot them, it would take more time than I had to devote to them. The website not working was a bit of a sadness as well, since we have several popular posts that have been linked to many times over our history (including topics of the Dark Knight, Zombies, Songs that mention a specific age, fictional political scientists, and the Job Market), but those links are now dead (until today). Given both my limited time and Claude Code’s potential for use by researchers in professional environments, I decided to gamble that $20 could bring this blog back.

My first few forays into Claude Code had nothing to do with the Quantitative Peace, but were instead to see if it could code some toy projects for me and deliver outcomes that would work even though I could not troubleshoot them myself. While this is counterintuitive, starting from ignorance seemed like a first step to understanding how much intervention I might need while using the tool.

First, I had Claude create a game that was like rock-paper-scissors, but it was about matching a handshake at random. Do you fist-bump, handshake, or high-five? The game had a simple 8-bit-like interface, and drawing the hands was difficult for the coding engine (as it is for most AI engines). I switched it to using hand emojis, and the core of the game worked well enough. I could deploy the HTML, and it ran. I wanted to create a high-score board as well, so Claude told me how to set up an external database that users could write to and the game could pull from for high scores. All worked pretty well. An inn joke inspired the game with a friend group, so I am not going to share the result here, but it did what I needed it to do.

For project two, I went back to my roots of coding in BASIC. As a teenager, I loved making text adventures. While I was firmly in the SNES/N64 era of graphics, text adventures were easy to code, and I had played enough Hitchhiker’s Guide and Zork to develop a passion for the genre. Using Claude, I made a game about publishing in international relations called Publish or Perish. This project turned out to be a ton of fun to make, as deciding what branches should look like, how deep the game should go, and whether to add more to it was captivating. The project itself is infinitely expandable and begging for more depth in the future, so it may be something I return to later.

With those two projects out of the way, I turned to my primary task: could it resolve my coding issues and help me recover this website? My first goal was to make a static version of the Quantitative Peace so that old links would work again. Claude was able to pull that off with some prompting and persistence. I uploaded that version of the website, and things were solid. Yet, I would rather have a fully functional blog if feasible. Phase 2 involved a bit more digging into the code and troubleshooting, but the site is back up and running as a working product.

This success led me to use Claude to revamp my website and update sections that had languished for over five years. While many of those tasks were small in nature, the number of updates became daunting over time, and having AI provide the code, formatting, and a list of items to add (or consider adding) was a helpful push in the right direction.

In sum: this website/blog exists again (which may be old-fashioned in the age of Substack). I do not know how research and journal standards will adapt to AI-assisted research in the near future. Some journals require scholars to submit a disclosure as to how AI was used, if at all, in the preparation of the manuscript, and that seems like a reasonable way to begin.

The post Publish or Perish: A Text Adventure of Academic Survival appeared first on The Quantitative Peace.

Home Office

As our home spaces have become work spaces, it is important to have better equipment to record lectures, record other kinds of content, or host synchronous sessions with students. So, there are a few things that you or your political scientist can do to up your game. Some of us may have university funds to help procure these items while many of us may have to dip into our own budgets

New Microphone – There are quite a few options on the market for microphones. Having a good microphone that you can control the volume of, have an external mute, and use either a physical or virtual mixer can be essential in producing distraction-free content for your students. I upgraded from my old Yeti Blue Snowball that I used for podcasting and I am now using a Yeti X. Directional sound, noise cancellation, frequency filtration, and adjusted treble/bass levels can provide a boost to audio content. I also have an arm mount for my microphone to better pick up sound and provide better directional pickup for my voice. Overall, an upgrade over an internal mic can go a long way in being an audio “green screen” of sorts to get rid of background noises. Speaking of which…

Green Screen – This may be less important for you (or your political scientist) if you have your own space or if your camera pointed at a wall; however, if you have a busy home with multiple working adults, children learning remotely, and/or other clutter you want to hide, then being able to chroma key your background and project an alternative setting, transparency, or solid color is an important part of your video content toolkit. I originally used the webaround for years as it is reasonably priced and easy to store. I have since upgraded to a more consistent option here. My animated Dr. Strangelove background has been my standard backdrop since March.

Lighting – If you are using a green screen then lighting is very important. If you are not using one, then lighting is still important, but it might be more optional. A few options for these include a tripod with a ring light, some other form of ring light to attach to your desk or monitor, or, on the higher end, getting one or two of these lights. Eliminating shadows and fully lighting up your face (and background) can offer better videos and conference calls.

Webcams – Many of you are probably fine here as this is a minimally necessary equipment that everyone probably has at this point with their stock equipment. I am a fan of the Logitech c920 series, but I don’t think too many people are in the market for these at that moment. If given a choice between upgrading from a stock microphone or a stock webcam, I would recommend the microphone first. However, if your content is mostly just a video of you (not slides/other people talking), then the camera may take priority.

Games

Table Top Simulator – I have historically recommended board games that illustrate important political science or social science concepts. However, getting together to play board games is more difficult and generally a bad idea right now. Table Top Simulator allows you and your friends (or co-workers) to use a virtual table (VR is not necessary, but is an option) and play with people from across the globe. The workshop for TTS has a robust collection of board games and contains many of the games I have suggested previously.

Civilization VI – I have recommend Civ V in the past, but VI, with its newest expansion, offers you the opportunity to play just one more turn (in perpetuity) as you put your civilization building skills to the test. If you haven’t played a Civ game before, you are missing out. You can get it on other platforms besides PC, but the game is a resource hog in the late game and best, in my experience, with a mouse and keyboard.

Dungeons & Dragons – I have been playing since AD&D Second Edition and, with the release of fifth edition and the pandemic, I have found myself playing D&D more than any other time in my life. Finding someone both willing and capable of being a good Dungeon Master is difficult, but being able to explore worlds, dungeons, interact with local and global politics and economics, shape international relations, and basically do anything you can imagine in a fantasy setting is a good exercise in collaborative imagination backed by statistical decision-making. Both of the campaigns I regularly play are in the context of macro-level political drama and help define the options available to our party.

There is a starter kit aimed for brand new groups, while more experienced player should look at the core books for playing the game (DM”s Guide, Player’s Handbook, and Monster Manual). There are reference manuals for adventures, campaigns, worlds, and items. Additionally, there are lots of 3rd party content to expand your adventures further. Additionally, there are quite a few options for playing with people online. Roll20 is probably the easiest to use, but both Fantasy Grounds and Foundry offer robust interfaces for those that need much more powerful tools in world building.

Two additional notes. D&D Beyond is a handy resource to get all of your books digitally and reduce the clutter. Also, Table Top Simulator (linked above) can also be used to run D&D campaigns!

Mahjong – Again, unless you can get three other people to play it in your household, this is a harder game to do in person at the moment. Also, no, it is not the solitaire game where you just pick up tiles from a pile. Some see it as a predecessor to Poker and a few of the Texas Hold ’em pros in the mid-2000s came from various Mahjong scenes. The game is rather intricate, relies quite a bit on reading information, and playing strategically. So, while poker is the go to analogy for strategic decision-making, whether between legislators or states, Mahjong has more to say about offensive and defensive strategy. If you get the basics down, there is even an International Relations scholar that has written an entire book on intermediate level strategy and introduces people to Tenhou, a popular online site to play Mahjong. Of course, this does not actually offer anything for you to buy the political scientist in your life as both the book and Tenhou are free to play. A physical mahjong set is an option, but you would likely already know if a person in your life is interested in the game enough to want a set.

Office Distractions

These are mostly whimsical entries and have been on my shortlist for a bit now. They make for good office toys, but lose a bit of purchase if you are the only person that can interact with them. They may be the academic equivalent of a fidget spinner.

A different world map – The Mercator projection is unsatisfactory for so many reasons and there are plenty of alternatives (relevant XKCD). I really wanted to get a copy of this map for my office, but my one attempt to order from overseas failed.

However, there are plenty of pedagogically interesting projections you can buy. The upside-down Mercator is an option. A 1922 and 1988 Van der Grinten is available. A more current Gall-Peters can be had. There are several different styles of map projections and some poking around on the net may yield you the projection of the world you desire.

Globe – A typical way to signify you are, indeed, a worldly professor. A global projection is better than a 2-dimensional one, but

Hourglass – Another potential professorial signifier, but it can be a way to mark your jam writing sessions and when you start looking at your email again.

Galton Board – A simple way to demonstrate normal curves to those that stop by your office hopefully later in the year.

Books

The Foundation – I will always recommend this to political scientists (and perhaps formal modelers/quantitative researchers broadly). This book’s fictional academic discipline seems to mirror what was budding in political science in the 1960s. As I wrote previously, “this foundational science fiction book by Asimov creates the social science theory of `Psycho-History;’ a study of groups of people and has the ability to predict their behavior.  Psycho-history cannot predict individuals, but can predict the movement of large bodies as if they were unitary actors.  The parallels between Asimov’s fictional social science and what we do should be obvious. This seven part series is a must-read for any political scientists interested in science fiction”

The Forever War – Most scifi shows do not properly deal with the relativity issues of traveling at near light speed (or faster), but this book offers some very useful implications of having wars with such travel possible. Probably mostly for IR scholars who like science fiction but less relevant to those outside of that intersection.

A book on R – I reached out to my co-editor and frequent co-author Michael E. Flynn for a recommendation on a good R book. I “grew up” learning Stata and had used R previously, but not consistently enough at this point in my career. So, this item is more of a personal inclusion. His recommendations for R and statistics are: Wickham’s R for Data Science, Baumer’s Modern Data Science with R, and McElreath’s Statistical Rethinking. I have so much work to do.

Streaming Services

In previous years, I recommended particular shows or movies, but people buy far fewer DVDs when much of that content is available through services. Of course, a gift card/1-year subscription can be a welcomed gift. So my top picks:

Disney+ – I have written about the implications of Civil War research on A New Hope previously (both in a book and on this blog), so having access to the full catalog of Star Wars is a plus. I think Mandolorian has less to offer in terms of political science, but there is some elements of state building that are useful.

CBS All Access – Star Trek. Discovery and Picard have both had their detractors, but both are finding their own space within the Star Trek Universe. If you are up on your Trek through the latest movies, Lower Decks has several in-universe references that are likely to amuse those who want a less grim-dark trek. Discovery and Picard both have several discussion points for political scientists, but I will leave that for a later post. Of note, the emotional intelligence of Discovery seems to be higher than previous Treks. People with an emotional or psychological problem are not an aberration to be solved in 45 minutes, but an ongoing struggle for a crew constantly experiencing difficult events with little room to recover or reflect. In some ways, Discovery has moved on from the Star Fleet officer as an ideal type trope and is giving us the Star Fleet officer as a human (or humanoid).

Netflix/Hulu: These are obvious, but a 1-year subscription can make a good gift regardless. Netflix (and HBO) have access to the West Wing, but that show feels like a distant memory these days.

Cold Hard Cash

It’s the economically efficient gift, but we apparently value fun in our utility function, this is probably not the right gift to give, but likely depends on your relationship with the person.

Bonus Challenge: Masks

I decided to see what the market looked like for political science masks. The two top entries where this one and this one. Surely, we can do better.

The post Gifts for Political Scientists, 2020 appeared first on The Quantitative Peace.

Back in early June I wrote that Donald Trump was in big trouble. Trump trailed Biden by close to double digits nationally. State level polls were equally grim. Nearly four months later, almost nothing has changed. Trump is down nearly double digits in the national polls and state-level polls show him trailing in every swing state, and at best running even some red states like Texas, Georgia, and Arizona.

As Cook Political Report elections analyst (and Twitter must follow) Dave Wasserman has noted, district-level polling, which suggested big problems for Clinton in 2016, backs up the national polls. Biden is running ahead of Trump in many suburban districts Trump carried by ten or more points in 2016. This spells trouble for down ballot Republicans.  

Decisions by the campaigns suggest their internal polling matches what is publicly available. Joe Biden is making trips to Iowa, a state Trump won by nearly double digits, as well as Georgia. Kamala Harris is headed to Texas. Meanwhile, Trump has made recent trips to Nebraska (Nebraska, like Maine, apportions Electoral Votes by Congressional district, and the district containing Omaha is very much in play), Ohio, and a last-minute fundraising trip to California. Mike Pence is campaigning in South Carolina, a state that was on nobody’s radar six months ago.   

The campaigns’ spending decisions mirror the polling. The Trump campaign is hurting for cash and pulling ads from key swing states including Ohio, New Hampshire, and Iowa. Biden has a three to one cash advantage and outspending Trump all over the map.   

Democratic early vote totals are massive. According to University of Florida Political Scientist Michael P. McDonald’s U.S. Elections Project, Democratic voters have requested far more absentee ballots than Republicans and are returning them at higher rates, at least so far. The Republicans are banking on Election Day turnout amid a pandemic to offset Democrat’s early vote advantage. This strikes me as extremely risky, to say the least.  

Regardless, turnout will be record breaking. There were 136 million ballots cast in 2016. I fully expect that there will be well over 150 million votes cast in 2020. Despite perceptions, I am not sure high turnout necessarily benefits one party over the other, but it is something to keep an eye on.

All and all, Biden is sitting in a very, very good position and Trump is in a world of trouble. Trump was unpopular in 2016. He’s unpopular now and has been throughout his term. There has been zero net movement in the polls since early summer and there is no reason to expect any significant movement with only a week to go.

This is not surprising. As I have noted elsewhere, Trump employed a terrible strategy in 2016 and is employing a terrible strategy now too. Trump’s campaign is a right-wing fever dream straight out of a Mark Levin segment on Hannity—it only speaks to the grievance driven right-wing media ecosystem and has zero penetration to the vast majority of people who remain outside the bubble. Trump is not a good politician and never has been. More than two hundred thousand Americans are dead in a pandemic. The President is doubling down on some bizarre conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden cooked up former NYC mayor and current presidential bagman Rudy Giuliani rather than overseeing any meaningful economic or public health response to COVID.   

Yeah, but what about 2016?

As a political analyst, I fully expect any claim that a Democratic candidate is in a good electoral position will be met with “yeah, but what about 2016?” for as long as I live. Fair enough. Trump’s victory in 2016 broke something in the minds of many liberals. Polls cannot be trusted! Trump must have political superpowers!

Nonsense. This is not 2016. Clinton was the second most unpopular presidential candidate of all time (right behind the current president) and probably deserves a place on the pantheon of all time worst presidential candidates. Biden has positive net favorability and his net favorability has actually improved over the course of the campaign. Biden is polling better among almost every demographic group relative to Clinton four years ago, including among core Trump groups like non-college whites and senior citizens.

Even the polls in 2016 were much more accurate than most people remember. In the high-quality national polls released right before Election Day, Clinton’s highest topline number was 48% (from Fox News), while most had her in the mid to low 40s. 538’s national polling average had Clinton winning the national popular vote 45.7-41.8 on election day, a 3.9-point margin. The actual margin was just over two points.

It was clear the election was close, but people chose to disregard the evidence that Clinton was not a shoe in to win. I had a reporter ask me in my office on Election Day 2016 “who was going to fill Tim Kaine’s Senate seat when he becomes Vice President” and I told him there was a real chance Trump could win. He was stunned. The red lights were flashing this time four years ago. Most people, especially people living in urban areas, just ignored them.

There are fewer, if any, warning signs this year. Biden is consistently polling above 50% nationally and his lead is more than twice as large as Clinton’s. His position in state polling is better much better too. Biden has put a half dozen states in play, including Texas, Ohio, and Iowa, that were off the table four years ago.

One important caveat is that Trump did overperform in a number of states relative to the polling (especially in the upper Midwest). This was largely due to polling firms over sampling college educated whites and under sampling non-college whites. The parties were not always divided along educational lines like they are today, and polling firms were slow to adjust. My sense is most of the legitimate polling outfits are taking this into account now. The polling in 2018 was very good on balance. There is no reason to expect Trump to overperform his polling once again.

Some of the “error” in the 2016 polling wasn’t even error at all. There were lots of undecided voters and lots of people saying they were going to vote for third party candidates. The majority of these people broke for Trump at the end. The pollsters were trying to hit a moving target.

Polls are instruments for measuring public opinion. There is going to be volatility in measurement if public opinion is shifting. Fluctuation in the polls is not necessarily a problem with the instrument, it might be a sign that public opinion is unstable. This was the case in 2016, when a large proportion of the electorate was vacillating right up until the end. There is none of that this year. People have made their minds up. The polls are stable. I expect an outcome that closely reflects the polling.  

Bottom Line

Trump won the Electoral College with 46-percent of the popular vote. This is a very difficult thing to do and there is absolutely no evidence that he has expanded his appeal. Trump can win, but it is going to take an even bigger Hail Mary than it did last time. This is someone who caught every break imaginable, not some act of political genius.

Furthermore, there is no way to objectively discuss this election without stating this is a disastrously failed presidency. The President’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Sunday the Administration has stopped trying to contain the COVID-19 epidemic. They quit on the job. There is no charitable way to describe this. They have flat out abandoned the American people amid the greatest public health crisis in a century. This is sheer lunacy from a public health perspective and reflects the fact that Trump has spent the last eight months trying to sabotage his own government’s response to the pandemic. It is madness.

I fully expect an outcome that reflects the reality that presidential approval is double digits underwater and has motivated the opposition to the extent where most Democrats would crawl over broken glass to vote against him. Turnout for Trump in rural areas will be very, very high, but turnout will be high everywhere. The suburbs are the kingmaker in American politics, and Trump has lost the suburbs.

Mitch McConnell got his judges. Now it is time to reap the whirlwind. Biden is going to flirt with 400 Electoral Votes. It is going to be a Republican bloodbath down the ballot. Nothing is off the table.

The post Presidential Election 2020: Where things stand with one week to go appeared first on The Quantitative Peace.

Donald Trump is in big trouble. Polls released last week from Monmouth University, CNBC, the Economist, ABC News/Washington Post, and CBS News have Trump trailing Biden by 4 to 11 points nationally. On average, Trump is down by 7.8 points.

State-level polling is equally grim. Biden is consistently polling ahead of Trump in the swing states. Perhaps even more concerning for Trump, Biden is statistically tied with Trump in a number of traditionally red states, including electoral vote rich Arizona and Texas.

Trump’s Base is not Big Enough

Trump’s struggles are unsurprising. To be sure, his largely white, Christian, and rural base is rock solid. His problem is that these voters are nowhere close to a majority. Trump is struggling to attract support among every ethnic and racial minority group. He is underwater with women. The partisan gender gap rivals the largest we have ever seen. He is also trailing Biden among white college graduates—a group that turned against the Republicans en masse in the 2018 Midterm.

For an incumbent president, this is an extremely weak electoral position—possibly the weakest we have seen since the invent of modern scientific polling.

The reasons for Trump’s struggles are clear. Throughout his tenure, Trump has made few attempts to expand his coalition. He is counting on a shrinking slice of the electorate to carry him to victory. This is not a good strategy. He was warned.

The 2012 Republican Postmortem

Following Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama, the Republican Party released a remarkable post-mortem. The report identified a host of problems: messaging, campaign infrastructure, campaign finance, and voter mobilization and made recommendations on how to fix them. Most importantly, the report identified one key problem: “The minority groups that President Obama carried with 80 percent of the vote in 2012 are on track to become a majority of the nation’s population by 2050 (pg. 12).”

The report made clear that the Republicans were risking permanent minority status unless the party could attract new voters. The authors made a number of proposals to increase support among “demographic partners,” including championing comprehensive immigration reform and adopting a “tone that takes into consideration of the Hispanic community.”

Donald Trump turned this report on its head. Trump made no effort to expand the Republican coalition. In fact, he is taking every opportunity to “build a wall” between the Republicans and their “demographic partners.”

Trump won in spite of his strategy, not because of it. The combination of an unpopular Democratic candidate, strong third-party showings, an October surprise from James Comey, and an Electoral College/popular vote inversion allowed Trump to win with only 46 percent of the vote. Trump threaded the needle.

Sometimes candidates do everything right and still lose. Other times, they do everything wrong and win. Trump accomplished the latter in 2016. He employed a strategy with a low chance of success, caught every break imaginable, and won. The problem is that Republican’s 2012 postmortem was fundamentally correct, and Trump is doing nothing to address these long-term problems. 

Trump will compound the GOP’s problems in 2020. Winning teams rarely change strategies. Most of the time this makes sense—go with a strategy until the other side proves they can stop it. Obama won in 2012 with a coalition that was remarkably similar to the one he formed in 2008. Trump is trying to do the same thing. The problem is Obama won 53-percent of the vote in 2008. Trump won 46-percent in 2016.

What My Research Shows

I document the political ramifications of America’s changing demographic landscape in a number of research papers (2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2018, 2019, 2020). I draw a couple points from this research that are relevant for understanding the 2020 presidential election.

My first point is that despite perceptions, 2016 did not produce a dramatic electoral realignment. Despite the narratives, Trump’s coalition looked much like Romney’s in 2012 and McCain’s in 2008—he performed very well among whites without college degrees. However, he did not do dramatically better among this group than his predecessors.

The biggest difference between the Romney and Trump coalitions is that Trump performed worse among college educated whites. This is a continuation of a long secular trend—professional class whites are moving away from the Republican Party and have been for some time. Trump accelerated this trend.

Trump did not forge a new coalition that will endure into the future, Trump won with a stripped-down version of the traditional Republican coalition. Barely.  

My second point is that the past four years have done nothing to alter the foundational transformation of the American electorate. Latinos and Asians are continually more powerful voting blocs. Both of these groups will strongly oppose Trump in 2020.

As I, and others have noted, the Republican Party could offset the political consequences of these demographic changes by winning a modestly larger proportion of the white vote—moving from consistently winning about 60%-61% of the white vote nationally to something closer to 64 or 65%. This is where Trump’s struggles among college educated whites becomes so damning.

There is very little room for the Republicans to form a majority coalition without winning more minorities or more college educated whites or some combination of the two. Performing poorly among both groups will lead to defeat. Trump is particularly ill-suited to make either happen.

Trump’s 2020 Path is Extremely Narrow

My argument is not that Trump cannot win. One lesson to learn from 2016 it is to not to confuse the unlikely with the impossible. Rather, there is no evidence to suggest that Trump has done anything to alter the country’s long-term political and demographic fundamentals.

As a result, Trump’s ceiling is low, especially by the standards of an incumbent president. He stands little chance of forming a popular vote majority. He is relying on being able to thread the needle in the Electoral College once again. It is a strategy with low probability of success.  

The post Trump’s Base Strategy is Unlikely to Work in 2020. He was Warned appeared first on The Quantitative Peace.

How do rebels treat civilians after they take control of territory in civil wars? The study of rebel governance has gained traction in recent years, but often looks at this phenomenon from a static perspective. Empirically, civil wars are frequently characterized by changes in territorial control. In our research, we combine these two perspectives and look at civilian victimization immediately after rebels seize territory.

Conflict researchers usually assume that civilian victimization is most severe in areas of actively contested control: areas with ongoing battles between a government and rebels. These areas are seen as most violent for civilians because armed actors attack civilians to deter defection and to enforce compliance. Once one side is able to establish firm control over a given territory, scholars generally expect civilian suffering to become less intense.

Taking rebel governance into account, we look at how long this process of establishing firmer control takes. We argue that civilian victimization will remain high—or even rise immediately after a rebel territorial takeover—until a basic level of governance and civilian compliance is established. In newly captured territory, rebels likely have less local knowledge to identify who is on their side and who might challenge their rule. Local capacities to govern non-violently, for example through co-opting local dispute resolution mechanisms, might be very limited for rebel fighters that are not used to govern. We argue that this lack of knowledge and resources makes it more likely that rebels first intimidate the local population with increased civilian targeting until they can transition to more stable and peaceful control.  

Rebel Violence Towards Civilians in Sierra Leone

To test our argument, we look at the Revolutionary United Front’s (RUF) actions during the civil war in Sierra Leone. The RUF controlled over half the country’s territory in 1998 and twice advanced into the capital of Freetown. This extremely violent rebel organization engaged in widespread and violent victimization of civilians. This included indiscriminate killings, abductions, and rape, which makes the RUF an extreme case of a non-state armed actor targeting civilians, in addition to the large areas it controlled during the conflict. Figure 1 shows different incidents of violence by geographic location and type of incident.

As the RUF committed many acts of violence against civilians and was not known for establishing governance institutions, we would expect levels of civilian victimization to remain consistently high, both before and after seizing territory, rather than peaking after territorial takeover and subsequently declining. Accordingly, we regard Sierra Leone as a good case to test our theory, because we would not expect to find support for it given the RUF’s patterns of behavior.

The Challenges of Analyzing Spatiotemporal Data

In order to understand patterns of civilian targeting by rebel groups, we need to look at individual incidents of violence, rather than aggregate trends. We do this by examining deliberate targeting of civilians by the RUF (between 1997 and 2001)—both lethal and nonlethal—to fully capture patterns of civilian victimization.  

These types of event-level data offer many advantages to researchers because they list the geographic location and date of each incident, but they bring their own challenges. The biggest challenge we face is deciding how to aggregate individual attacks into geographic units as the results of statistical analyses can vary depending on this decision.

Using data from both UCDP GED and ACLED we apply matched wake analysis (MWA), a difference-in-differences design for spatiotemporal event data, to estimate the causal effect of territorial takeover on civilian victimization. MWA allows us to circumvent the problem of obtaining results due to the arbitrary choice of a particular space and time window by generating estimates from multiple different possible combinations. We also use matching to control for the effects of local factors such as distance to the nearest diamond mine, because diamond revenue was regarded as crucial in the Sierra Leone civil war.

Acquiring Control Can Mean More Violence

Our analysis points to a positive effect of rebel territorial takeover on subsequent civilian targeting after a battle between the government and the RUF. However, this effect is limited in its temporal and spatial scope to thirty-five days and up to four kilometers from the battle. Put differently, higher levels of civilian victimization occur following the assertion of rebel control over a contested territory, but only in the direct vicinity of the battles where rebels seized territory from the government. This fits our expectation that at locations where violent territorial transfer occurs, the interactions between rebels and civilians become even more violent.

Looking more closely at distance to diamond mines and the capital, it becomes clear that the amount of violence that accompanies rebel efforts to establish governance is a function of how far they are from the capital and how close they are to a diamond mine. In other words, rebel efforts to establish governance are more violent if the territory offers rents they can extract and if it is further away from the center of power, thus reducing the likelihood of government forces seeking to regain control quickly.

What Does This Mean for the Study of Civilian Violence in Civil Wars?

Given our extreme case selection, follow-up research should examine if other civil wars show similar violent transition periods after territorial takeover. Our research reveals that the establishment of rebel governance might be a violent process despite rebels’ long-term dependence on civilian support. Civilian life under newly established rebel governance might be more dangerous, but we have to study other cases of territorial takeovers to understand all mechanisms.

Our evidence for a violent transition to power also suggests that we should study rebel governance with a temporal perspective in mind. If rebel rulers and their behaviour towards civilians change over time, research on rebel governance should carefully compare how rebels rule during different stages of territorial control. When, and under what circumstances, this violent transition period turns into stable and nonviolent governance and the provision of public goods requires further research as well. This is also relevant for future research on patterns of civilian victimization.

The post Civilian Victimization and Rebel Territorial Control in Sierra Leone appeared first on The Quantitative Peace.

This is a guest post by Brendan Skip Mark and Efe Tokdemir. This post is based on research from their article When Killers Become Victims: Diversionary War, Human Rights, and Strategic Target Selection, published in International Interactions.

Was the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani an attempt to divert attention from President Trump’s unfavorable domestic attention, and if so, will it be successful? The event parallels an earlier historical example. In 1998, a New York Times headline read “Impeachment Vote in the House Delayed As Clinton Launches Iraq Air Strike, Citing Military Need to Move Swiftly.” Then as now, many questioned whether the use of force in Iraq was meant to divert attention from President Clinton’s impeachment.

A string of research in political science has examined how Presidents use this rally effect to divert attention away from an unpopular domestic situation. The use of force abroad is believed to create a “rally around the flag” effect by increasing the public’s patriotism as the American people unite against a common, foreign enemy. Put simply, the diversionary use of force is when the increase in patriotism also spills over into support for the Commander in Chief, which then distracts from any unfavorable domestic attention.

It’s important to first lay out the nature of this conflict. The US-Iran conflict includes six major events. First, in December of 2019, an Iranian-backed militia launched a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base that killed an American contractor and wounded four US service members. In retaliation, the US launched an airstrike at five locations in Iraq and Syria that killed 24 Iranian-backed militia members. Iraq’s leader argued this was a violation of their sovereignty, and shortly after, the US embassy in Baghdad was stormed by Iraqi citizens protesting these killings. Three days later the US assassinated General Soleimani, the commanding general of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s Quds Force, and five others in an overnight drone strike at Baghdad airport. A few days later unknown rockets were fired near the US embassy in Baghdad, and on January 7^th Iran launched rockets at two Iraqi bases housing US troops in al Assad and Erbil.

Was Soleimani’s killing an act of diversionary conflict?

In order for the use of force to be diversionary, it must meet a few criteria: First, a leader must need to divert public attention from unfavorable domestic conditions. President Trump is undoubtedly in the midst of domestic turmoil that could benefit from a distraction. With an election on the way, his approval rating hovers around 42%, he recently became the third president in US history to be impeached, and 52% of Americans believe he should be removed from office. What’s more, his foreign policy, the place where presidents have the most direct power, has been heavily criticized; most recently with his decision to pull US troops out of Syria leaving the ground to Russia, Iran and Turkey.

Second, for a diversionary use of force to be successful two criteria must be met. First, the conflict has to grab media headlines and the people’s attention. In other words, it has to actually divert everyone’s attention from the domestic situation. This condition is undoubtedly met by the assassination of General Soleimani. Media coverage of US-Iran relations totally eclipsed all other news stories as the conflict unfolded. Questions of whether we will see war with Iran abound, with coverage varying between Iran backing down, the US backing down, and warnings that future escalation may be likely or unavoidable. At the time of this piece, news stories continue to emerge questioning whether the conflict will escalate once again.

Third, the use of force must be justifiable, defensible, and not an obvious attempt to divert attention. The choice of target is therefore quite important. In fact, our research shows that when leaders face domestic trouble, they are more likely to target regimes who violate human rights because the use of force against a repressive regime is both more successful at diverting attention and more easily justified.

Iran is an authoritarian and repressive state with very few civil and political rights. Indeed, the CIRIGHTS human rights dataset shows that Tehran’s scores on the use of torture, killings, disappearances, and political imprisonment for 2017 puts Iran as the 11^th most repressive state in the world.[1] The Iranian government engages in the widespread violation of its citizens rights to peaceful assembly, free movement, religious freedom, labor rights, women’s rights, and free speech. According to our research, Iran is a good target for the use of diversionary force.

The US government justified its use of force by pointing out the repressive nature of Iran with President Trump calling him a “monster” whose death would save many lives. As a reminder, by almost all international accounts prior to this conflict, General Soleimani was a terrorist, possibly a war criminal, and responsible for many acts of repression carried out against the Iranian people. The United Nations had already banned him from traveling outside of Iran (UNSC Resolution 2231), the European Union had designated him as a terrorist for his activities in Syria (EU Reg. No. 790/2014), and the US had implemented sanctions against him in 2007 for proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (Executive Order 13382).

The US government also justified the assassination as self-defense to save American lives from an “imminent” attack. It should be noted that there is little publicly available evidence to corroborate this claim. Further, the UN Rapporteur on extra-judicial executions, Agnes Callamard, publicly tweeted that the assassination was most likely unlawful. However, as we argue, diversionary uses of force abroad are particularly effective when the international community is unwilling or unable to punish repression and the US can claim to be acting on behalf of those whose rights are violated.    

What explains Iran’s behavior?

Altogether, these conditions make Iran a perfect target to divert public attention from domestic affairs. But that begs the question of why Iran bombed an American base in the first place? “Strategic conflict avoidance” theory suggests that the Iranian government should have been aware of President Trump’s need to divert attention from his impeachment, and therefore, should have kept a low profile as their odds of be targeted were high. The Iranian regime and Trump administration may be implementing the same tactic.

Iranian leaders are facing their own domestic trouble and they have their own incentives to use this conflict for diversionary purposes. Protests and strikes in Iran have been ongoing since 2017. Protesters have called for radical changes to the country’s economic policies, political reform, and have threatened the Iranian leadership directly. The government has resorted to widespread repression to try and quash the protests with little success. In November 2019, a mass protest broke out over a hike in fuel prices, and the government responded by killing somewhere between 300 and 1,500 peaceful protesters (a mass atrocity by most definitions). The threat of war with the US could help demobilize these mass protests and allow the Iranian government to create its own “rally around the flag.”

So, what does it mean for the future of this conflict if both sides are trying to use force for diversionary purposes? Diversionary use of force theory expects leaders to engage in strategic foreign policy to divert public attention and boost popularity, but leaders have to be careful not to escalate the conflict or it may end up more costly than either leader wanted. Neither the US nor Iran wants a war right now; therefore, diversionary actions should stop at the edge of war. We should witness a de-escalation period regarding the final moves of both countries: President Trump publicly stated after the Iranian missile attack that “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime” and that Iran was standing down. News reports since then have pointed out that dozens of US troops were injured and suffer brain damage. President Trump has dismissed these injuries as “headaches”. This implies the US has built Iran a golden bridge to retreat across” as Sun Tzu puts in The Art of War. President Trump’s decision to threaten sanctions rather than military force or boots on the ground appears to indicate an unwillingness to allow this conflict to escalate. News reports at the time of this writing have noted that Iran has similarly taken steps to de-escalate the conflict.

Key takeaways

In sum, there is good evidence that Trump ordered the killing of General Soleimani to divert attention from his domestic troubles as the assassination of Soleimani meets all of the conditions necessary for a diversionary use of force. The assassination captured the attention of every major media outlet, as well as the public, and was justified as both self-defense and the execution of a “monster.”

Iran similarly seems to be using this conflict to divert attention away from the mass protests that are threatening their regime. By raising the possibility of war with the US, the Iranian regime hopes to demobilize protesters who may take the death of General Soleimani, a key figure in the repressive tools employed by the state, as the spark of a new democratic movement.

One of the conclusions of our research and the broader political science literature is that foreign policy is rarely carried out to improve human rights. Similarly, the use of violence for the purposes of improving human rights has a pretty poor track record. While much of the media has focused on the Iran-US conflict in terms of sincere actions by leaders in both countries, we argue that much of the conflict may be diversionary. If leaders are engaging in a diversionary conflict, then much of the tension surrounding this conflict has been fabricated to benefit the leadership in both countries. Viewed through this lens Iran is helping President Trump stay in power, and President Trump is helping the Iranian leadership stay in power. Far from either country trying to destroy or cripple the other, this conflict has strengthened both leaders’ power within their own country.

Brendan Skip Mark is an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Rhode Island. His research examines the causes and consequences of human rights violations in relation to conflict and development policy. He is also a co-director of the CIRIGHTS human rights data project. Follow him on Twitter: @SkipMark1

Efe Tokdemir is an assistant professor of International Relations at Bilkent University. His research revolves around behavioral and attitudinal responses of individuals to violent vs. non-violent strategies pursued by the state and non-state armed actors. Follow him on Twitter: @efetokdemir

[1] They are tied for 11^th with 6 other countries.

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The work was an interesting collaborative process and we may create a followup post that discusses writing the article and the strategy of framing and publishing the manuscript. You can find our lengthy appendix, replication data, our original data, and other material related to our work here. For now, you can enjoy the article on APSR’s first view. The abstract is:

How do citizens within countries hosting U.S. military personnel view that presence? Using new cross-national survey data from 14 countries, we examine how different forms of exposure to a U.S. military presence in a country affect attitudes toward the U.S. military, government, and people. We find that contact with U.S. military personnel or the receipt of economic benefits from the U.S. presence correlates with stronger support for the U.S. presence, people, and government. This study has profound implications for the role that U.S. installations play in affecting the social fabric of host nations and policy implications for the conduct of U.S. military activities outside the United States.

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A word on course design: I designed the course after the civil war class I took from Patrick Regan at Binghamton in graduate school. Each day has one assigned reading and a menu of optional readings for students. Each student must read three articles for the week and will weave the additional readings into the conversational flow of the course. As such, the list of readings can be lengthy as long as it is manageable for me to be familiar with the works.

Political Science 525 Syllabus – Civil War and Terrorism

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