Paul Musgrave

Refining the Oil Curse Country-Level Evidence From Exogenous Variations in Resource Income

Is there a resource curse? Some scholars argue that resource income is associated with slower transitions to democracy; others contend that the negative effects of resources are conditional on factors such as institutional quality. To test these competing hypotheses, this article exploits the price spike caused by the 1973 oil embargo, which transformed several countries with latent oil industries into resource-reliant states. Our quasi-experimental research design allows for better identification of causation than the associational approaches common in the literature. We use the method of synthetic controls to compare the political development of states that received resource-derived revenue with how these states would have behaved in a counterfactual world without such revenue. We find that there is little evidence that a resource curse systematically prevents democratization or that institutional quality alone determines outcomes. Nevertheless, resource income meaningfully affects outcomes and even contributes to democratization in some instances.

The global transformation: more than meets the eye

Buzan and Lawson’s The Global Transformation establishes that many of the basic parameters of world politics originated in the ‘long 19th century’. Despite finding much to admire in their book, we are concerned that it lacks an explicit theory of change. In its drive to highlight the novelty and exceptionalism of the 19th century, it offers insufficient guidance on two key issues: first, how international relations scholars should situate Buzan and Lawson’s ‘global transformation’ in existing debates over transhistorical processes; and, second, how they should apply lessons from that transformation to understanding emergent trends in the contemporary world. We argue that a more explicit study of causal factors might help account for why the 19th century was unusual. We conclude with thoughts about how the field should proceed after The Global Transformation . In particular, it points to how concatenating changes could profoundly alter international politics – an approach we term ‘Exotic International Relations’. Buzan and Lawson’s book therefore serves as a marker for the importance of systematically theorizing how radical potentialities for transformation might rearrange existing structural assemblages in world politics.

The Making of the Pundit, 2010: When Strong Ties Trump Weak Ones

Motivated by an experience serving as a “campaign manager” for a colleague’s online bid to become the Washington Post ’s “Next Great Pundit,” I present an argument showing when reliance on Internet–based social networking tools (such as Facebook and Twitter) may lead campaigns to perform more poorly than those which can use old-fashioned retail politics.

Defending Hierarchy from the Moon to the Indian Ocean: Symbolic Capital and Political Dominance in Early Modern China and the Cold War

Why do leading actors invest in costly projects that they expect will not yield appreciable military or economic benefits? We identify a causal process in which concerns about legitimacy produce attempts to secure dominance in arenas of high symbolic value by investing wealth and labor into unproductive (in direct military and economic terms) goods and performances. We provide evidence for our claims through a comparative study of the American Project Apollo and the Ming Dynastys treasure fleets. We locate our argument within a broader constructivist and practice-theoretic understanding of hierarchy and hegemony. We build on claims that world politics is a sphere of complex social stratification by viewing constituent hierarchies in terms of social fields. Our specific theory and broader framework, we contend, provide tools for understanding the workings of power politics beyond military and economic competition.

Political Outcome Bias in Grading: Identifying Problems and Suggesting Solutions

Political bias in the academy is a topic of great controversy. Many conservatives have argued that liberals dominate American campuses and use their classrooms to indoctrinate students or to discriminate against those with differing political beliefs. Liberals have responded by calling studies that purport to demonstrate these claims as flawed or as attacks on academic freedom. Regardless of the magnitude of campus political bias, it is ill-advised for the scholarly community to argue that it is immune from bias because scholars simply are fair. This article focuses on one element of political bias: partisan “outcome” bias in grading. We proceed in several steps. First, we provide an overview of the problem of grading bias and the concerns about political bias. Next, we consider the attributes of political grading bias and the forms that it can take. We present the analytics of partisan outcome bias and logic of using “paired” assignments to eliminate outcome bias. We provide data and analysis concerning outcome bias from a course Rom has taught. We conclude with a discussion of the ethics of grading.