Measurement
In this set of projects, I use advanced quanitative methods to tackle the problem of more accurately measuring concepts of interest in international relations. One uses Bayesian latent variable models to directly assess the strength of peace agreements in civil conflict rather than having to use agreement duration as a proxy for strength. Another harnesses advances in big data and develops new measures of economic interdependence and methods for detecting disruptions of regular economic exchange between states from a product-level trade dataset with over two billion observations.
Articles
David B. Carter, Bailee Donahue, and Rob Williams. “Border Walls, Cooperation, and Illicit Trade.” International Studies Quarterly
The number of fortified borders around the world has risen precipitously. This surge in walls is an important part of the larger globalization “backlash,” as countries react to the unwanted consequences of economic openness and globalization, with a rise in illicit trade and smuggling being a prominent example. Despite the prominence of the idea that walls are built to combat illicit flows, no research systematically explores how walls generally affect illicit trade. This is a notable omission for at least two reasons. First, the most prominent explanations for wall construction put combating illicit trade front and center. Second, recent work that finds walls significantly reduce legal trade argues that this finding derives from border fortifications diverting illegal trade to ports of entry, which leads to more inspection, security, and transaction costs. We develop a new measure of illicit trade flows using over five decades of product-level data and provide a battery of evidence that shows border barriers increase illicit flows at ports of entry.
Rob Williams, Daniel Gustafson, Stephen Gent, and Mark Crescenzi. “A Latent Variable Approach to Measuring and Explaining Peace Agreement Strength.” Political Science Research and Methods.
Much of the peace agreement durability literature assumes that stronger peace agreements are more likely to survive the trials of the post-conflict environment. This work does an excellent job identifying which provisions indicate that agreements are more likely to endure. However, there is no widely accepted way to directly measure the strength of agreements, and existing measures suffer from a lack of nuance or reliance on subjective weighting. We use a Bayesian item response theory model to develop a principled measure of the latent strength of peace agreements in civil conflicts from 1975-2005. We illustrate the measure’s utility by exploring how various international factors such as sanctions and mediation contribute to the strength or weakness of agreements.
Article Preprint Supplemental Information Replication Archive GitHub Repo
Working papers
Rob Williams. “Measuring Peace Agreement Strength in Civil War.”
This paper presents the Peace Agreement Strength Scores (PASS) of peace agreements in civil conflicts. The scores capture the strength of peace agreements at the time of signing and can be used to avoid relying on the duration of agreement survival as a proxy for agreement strength. The scores are used to show descriptively that stronger peace agreements tend to be signed in more intractable conflicts, suggesting that a selection effect may be at play in the process of agreement signing and duration. The scores are available for all peace agreements signed in UCDP/PRIO civil conflicts from 1975-2018.
Working Paper Supplemental Information
Bailee Donahue, Rob Williams, and Mark Crescenzi. “Unsettled Borders in a Market Context.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Peace Science Society (International), Manhattan, KS, November 2019, the International Studies Association Midwest Annual Conference, St. Louis, MO, November 2019, and the Annual Conference of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA, September, 2020.
Border disputes between states can be very costly and disruptive, including major disruptions in trade. From an aggregate perspective, scholars traditionally expect these costs and disruptions to place pressure on states to avoid or resolve these disputes quickly. This view, however, risks oversimplification of the quality of trade and the economic actors driving that trade. We investigate the consequences of complex trade relations on border disputes. Variation in the composition of trade, whether characterized by uniqueness on the global market or readily available substitutes, generates variation in the presence and intensity of domestic pressure to avoid or resolve border disputes. We examine the effects of this variation on dispute behavior using an original dataset that combines product-level trade data (spanning from 1962-2001) with ICOW territorial claims data. The use of product-level trade data allows for the analysis of substitutability options which may reduce exit costs and make it easier to escalate border disputes. This analysis helps us better understand the choice to forego trade due to border disputes, and furthers our understanding of the economic impact of unsettled borders.