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Warring Leviathans: Conflict Among Hierarchies and the Evolution of Human Prosociality

Using a computational model, this project argues that intergroup conflict makes the creation of coercive centralized hierarchy more likely by increasing within-group cooperation and that institutions which were built up during conflict can be ex-post efficient even in times of peace and therefore can outlast the conflicts which provided their initial impetus.

The Trilemma of Hegemonic Order Competition

Great powers engaged in hegemonic competition face a trilemma as they can only achieve 2 out of the 3 desirable policy objectives that are: maximizing their influence, promoting their values, ensuring peace.

The Power to Hurt, to be Hurt, and Public Support for War

This project introduces a new survey instrument to investigate the relation between the power to hurt (i.e. enemy casualties) and to be hurt (i.e. friendly casualties) and their combined impact on the willingness to support the use of military force.

The Power to Hurt and Public Support for War

This project finds that individuals have an intuitive sense of the power to hurt and explores three plausible mechanisms that could account for this dynamic.

Survey Experiments as Supervised Learning

This project draws on psychometrics and machine learning techniques to propose a non-parametric Bayesian method to optimize complex multidimensional experimental estimation.

Refining known unknowns? Modeling and Measuring Uncertainty

This project leverages a partial observability model of conflict initiation to estimate systemic uncertainty, where values of the unobserved variables are inferred from the relationship of observed variables to outcomes.

Public Opinion, Democratic Institutions, and Leader Credibility

This paper researches how democratic backsliding impact the ability of credibility of leaders abroad by distinguishing between the effects of domestic polarization and of weakening democratic institutions.

Only Doves could send Nixon to China

A counterintuitive finding in IR is that important changes in policy are initiated by unlikely leaders. This project emphasizes that public preferences are central to explain this dynamic.

Measuring International Order: Three Approaches to an Amorphous Concept

This paper proposes to quantify common usages of "international order" in order to catalyze a more robust scientific research program on this important concept.

Measurement Precision versus User Fatigue: Temporal Discounting in Politics

This projects examines the impact of established survey instruments on the cognitive burden of participants and proposes a new instrument design to improve survey response quality.