Participant Biographies and Paper Abstracts

Nathaniel L. Beck, Professor of Political Science (and Associated Faculty Member in Economics), University of California at San Diego.

Professor Beck will serve as primary rapporteur for this conference.

Professor Beck (Ph.D. Yale University, 1977) is a specialist in political economy (politics of U.S. economic policy, politics of comparative monetary policy) and methodology (time-series, time-series--cross-sections, likelihood based methods, non-linear methods). He is the author of many articles in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics and Political Analysis as well as various edited books. His current research interests include the econometrics of cross-national panels, the quantitative analysis of international conflict and applications of generalized additive models (and related non-linear methods) in political science. He is co-editor of the book series Foundations of Political Analysis (University of Michigan Press), editor of Political Analysis and a member of the editorial board of the American Political Science Review. He is vice-president of the Political Methodology Organized Subfield of the American Political Science Association. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in methodology, and undergraduate courses in political economy and public policy. He also teaches in the summer programs in methodology at the University of Michigan and Essex University (England). He was awarded the Gosnell Prize for the best paper in political methodology (1997).

Harvey Starr, Dag Hammarskjold Professor in International Affairs University of South Carolina, Columbia.

Harvey Starr's (PhD Yale University, 1971) research and teaching interests include theories and methods in the study of international relations, war and international conflict, geopolitics and diffusion analyses, and domestic influences on foreign policy (revolution; democracy). His current research interests include the two-level analysis of security management; various approaches to the democratic peace; geopolitics and the use of Geographic Information Systems; and an analysis of the agent-structure problem.

In 1991 he became editor of International Interactions. He has served as President of the Conflict Processes Section of the American Political Science Association (1992-95), and as Vice President of the American Political Science Association (1995-96). He previously taught at Indiana University, serving as Chairman of the Department of Political Science from 1984-1989. He is author or co-author of eight books and monographs, and over fifty journal articles or book chapters. His most recent books are World Politics: The Menu for Choice, 5th ed. (W. H. Freeman, 1996 with Bruce Russett); Anarchy, Order, and Integration: How to Managed Interdependence (University of Michigan Press, 1997), and Agency, Structure, and International Politics (Routledge, 1997, with Gil Friedman).

Conference paper:

Opportunity, Willingness, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS): Reconceptualizing Borders in International Relations.

Paper in WordPerfect and PDF format.

Brady Baybeck, Washington University, St. Louis, MO. and Robert Huckfeldt, Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Brady Baybeck is a doctoral candidate, Department of Political Science. Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130

Professor Robert Huckfeldt's (PhD Michigan) research and teaching interests lie in the areas of electoral politics and empirical theory. He is currently engaged in studies of race in American politics, social influence in electoral politics, the structures of political dynamics, and cross-national studies of political communication. He is the author of articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, American Journal of Sociology, American Politics Quarterly, Political Behavior, Mathematical and Computer Modeling, and the Journal of Theoretical Politics. He is also the author or co-author of Dynamic Modeling, Politics in Context, Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics, and Citizen, Politics, and Social Communication. Professor Huckfeldt is currently chair of the political science department at Indiana University

Conference paper:

Urban Networks, Urban Contexts, and the Diffusion of Political Information.

Paper in PDF format.

Carol Hohfeld, University of Missouri at St. Louis and John Sprague, Washington University, St. Louis

Carol W. Kohfeld (Ph.D., Washington University, 1977) is currently engaged in research on crime in St. Louis -- "Crime in Context: Social and Economic Determinants of Crime." She coauthored Dynamic Modeling: An Introduction which is in the Sage quantitative series, Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics, and articles in such journals as Political Methodology, Criminology, and Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. Her areas of interest include urban politics, methodology, and policy analysis. Professor Kohfeld was elected Vice President of the Midwest Political Science Association for 1994 to 1996.

John Sprague (Ph.D. Stanford 1964) is the Souers Professor of Government at Washington University. Sprague has written on lawyers in politics, voting on the U.S. Supreme Court, systems analysis for social scientists, the dynamics of riots, political behavior in social and political context, urban voting behavior, and the structure of urban crime including homicide. His current research pursues voting in context (survey and census based data taken during and after the 1996 Presidential campaign in St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and Indianapolis supported by NSF in a grant joint with Robert Huckfeldt - Indiana) and the dynamics of homicide in both time and space (four decades of data for the City of St. Louis associated with the St. Louis Homicide Project currently supported by NSF in a joint grant with Carol Kohfeld - UMSL and Rick Rosenfeld - UMSL). Sprague's persistent scientific interests are in the dynamic structure of social and political processes and the ways in which such processes are conditioned by the micro and macro environments (the context) within which they take place.

Conference paper:

Race and Turnout

Paper in PDF and Word format.
Revised Figure 21 in PDF format.

Mohan Penubarti, Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles and Michael D. Ward, Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle.

Mohan Penubarti (PhD Colorado, 1993) is an assistant professor of political science at UCLA where he directs the Political Methodology Workshop. Professor Penubarti has written widely on international property rights and international trade. He is also an expert in the field of political methodology, as it relates to spatial analysis. He has recently applied and extended the ecological inference techniques to panels of surveys. His publications have appeared in the Journal of International Economics, International Interactions, International Security, and Defence Economics. His is currently working on a book manuscript exploring the role of intellectual property rights in a global economy. He is co-editor of The Political Methodologist.

Michael D. Ward (Ph.D. Northwestern University 1977) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, Seattle. He was Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado 1981-1997 and he has published widely in the fields of economics, political science, and political geography. He has been supported consistently with NSF funding. With John O’Loughlin, he conducted investigations into the diffusion of democracy, bringing spatial techniques to the fields of comparative politics and international relations. His 1992 volume, The New Geopolitics, was instrumental in energizing research into geographical aspects of international relations.

Conference paper:

Commerce and Democracy

Paper in PDF format.

Paul Diehl, Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, and Jaroslav Tir

Paul F. Diehl (Ph.D. Michigan 1983) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has held faculty positions at the University of Georgia and SUNY-Albany. His recent books include War and Peace in International Rivalry (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), The Dynamics of Enduring Rivalries (University of Illinois Press, 1998), The Politics of Global Governance: International Organizations in an Interdependent World (Lynne Rienner, 1996), International Peacekeeping (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), and Territorial Changes and International Conflict (Routledge, 1992). He is the editor of seven other books and the author of more than eighty articles on international security matters. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including those from the National Science Foundation, United States Institute of Peace, and the Lilly Foundation. His areas of expertise include the causes of war, U.N. peackeeping, enduring rivalries, and territorial conflict. He is the two time recipient of the Clarence Berdahl Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He was the 1998 recipient of the Karl Deutsch Award given by the International Studies Association to the leading young scholar on peace and conflict issues and received the 1998-99 LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Conference paper:

The Political Geography of Enduring Rivalries.

Paper in Word and PDF format.

Michael D. Ward, Political Science, University of Washington and Kristian S. Gleditsch, Social Science, University of Glasgow, Scotland

Kristian Gleditsch (PhD Colorado, 1999) is on the Graduate Faculty of Social Science at the University of Glasgow. Gleditsch's general research interest include international conflict and cooperation, democratization, and political methodology, and his work has been published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly and Political Psychology. A former NSF GAD fellow in IBS, his dissertation research has been supported by a doctoral dissertation grant from the Norwegian Research Council. In 1998-99, he was a research fellow at the Harvard-MIT Data Center and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

Conference paper:

Location, Location, Location: An MCMC Approach to Modeling Spatial Context with Categorical Variables

Paper in PDF format.

Colin Flint, Mark Harrower and Robert Edsall, Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University

Colin Flint (PhD Colorado, 1995) is Assistant Professor of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University. He was as Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech University, 1995-1998. He has published on extremist political movements in Weimar Germany and the United States and is currently engaged in a project funded by the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission on hate groups in that state. He is the co-author of Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality (Longman 1999), the most widely-used and praised advanced text in the subject.

Conference paper:

But How Does Place Matter? Using Bayesian Networks to Explore a Structural Definition of Place

See http://www.geovista.psu.edu/publications/FHE/fhepaper.htm.

Also in Word format. Figures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Michael Shin, School of International Studies, University of Miami, Florida and John Agnew, Geography,University of California, Los Angeles.

Michael E. Shin (Ph.D. in Geography, University of Colorado at Boulder, 1998), assistant professor, has teaching and research interests in the geographical aspects of international relations, electoral geography, and the use of geographic information technology in social science research. Recently, he conducted survey research (funded by a dissertation grant from the National Science Foundation) in Italy that examined the various social mechanisms underlying the changing dynamics of regional voting behaviors. He is currently studying the geography of the defense burden, as well as the geography of party replacement in Italy. Journals in which Professor Shin has published include Erdkunde, Journal of Conflict Resolution and Annals of the Association of American Geographers. His co-authored piece with John O’Loughlin that appeared in Post-Soviet Geography and Economics won the Theodore Shabad Prize for best article in 1996.

John Agnew (Ph.D. Ohio State University, 1975) is Professor and Chair of Geography at UCLA. He was a faculty member at Syracuse University from 1975 to 1996. Professor Agnew is the author of 11 books, including Place and Politics (1987), Geopolitics (1998), Mastering Space (1995), and the Geography of the World Economy (1994). He is also the author of over 75 research articles and book chapters. He was the recipient of the first Annual Plenary Lectureship Award in Political Geography from the Association of American Geographers in 1995. His major research foci are the role of contexts in Italian politics, US geopolitics in world affairs, and the historiography of geopolitics.

Conference paper:

The Geography of Party Replacement in Italy, 1987 - 1996

Paper in PDF format.

Daniel Z. Sui and Peter J. Hugill (Texas A&M University, College Station, TX)

Daniel Z. Sui (PhD Georgia, 1993) is currently an associate professor and graduate program director in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University. His primary research interests are theoretical issues in geographic information science (GIScience), the applications of geographic information systems (GISystems) in social sciences, and the impacts of information technologies on society. He has published widely in these three areas. His papers have appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, Urban Geography, Socio-Economic Planning Science, and Professional Geographer, etc. He is a participant in several initiatives of the NSF-funded Varenius Project to advance geographic information science. He was named as the 1998-1999 Big 12 Faculty Fellow. Daniel Sui is also the recipient of the best Journal of Geography paper award offered by the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) in 1996. Sui is currently working on two books - one on the theoretical foundations of GIScience and the other on the E-merging geography of the information society.

Peter J. Hugill (PhD Syracuse 1977) is a professor of geography at Texas A&M University. His research interest is the geopolitics from the world system perspective. He is the author numerous articles and several books, the most recent of which is Global Communications since 1844: Geopolitics and Technology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). He is also the author/co-author of World Trade Since 1431: Geography, Technology and Capitalism, Re-Reading Cultural Geography (1994), Upstate Arcadia: Landscape, Aesthetics, and the Triumph of Social Differentiation in America (1995), The Transfer and Transformation of Ideas and Material Culture (1987). He teaches political, cultural, and historical geography and in his spare time works as a local political activist with neighborhood and homeowner associations.

Proposed Paper Title and Description:

GIS, Electoral Geography, and the Empowerment of Local Communities

This paper is a case study using GIS to analyze local electoral geography and empower local communities in the local political process. Two recent local election results for the city of College Station are georeferenced to each voting precinct using ArcView GIS. Detailed voter information is geocoded via address matching. Spatial voting patterns will be mapped out using GIS and rigorous spatial statistical analysis will be conducted using SpaceStat. Conceptually, this research is tied to two threads in the recent literature: The directional vs. proximity voting debate and the related issues in ecological inference among political scientists and political geographers. We expect our results to offer new empirical support to the proximity theory in voting behavior. By deploying the capabilities of GIS to aggregate data to different geographical scales and areal unit boundaries, we also empirically test Gary King's solutions to the ecological inference problem. We will demonstrate how GIS can facilitate political scientists and geographers addressing both conceptual (directional vs. proximity voting) and methodological (ecological inference) issues. This paper will also shed new light on how GIS can be used at the grass-root level to address controversial land use issues. Although GIS has been widely criticized as an invasive technology that advantages the wealthy, the powerful, and corporate interests, we show that GIS can be deployed to empower such community groups as neighborhood and homeowner associations in the local political process.

PowerPoint Presentation

Jeffrey Kopstein and David Reilly, Political Science, University of Colorado, Boulder

Jeffrey Kopstein (PhD California-Berkeley, 1991) is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Central and East European Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany 1945-1989 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997) and numerous articles on political economy, ethnicity, and post-communist politics of Eastern Europe. Currently, he is on leave at Princeton University and will be an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Germany in 2000-01.

David Reilly is a doctoral candidate from the Department of Political Science and Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado. His areas of research include the diffusion of democracy, foreign military intervention, and the domestic-international conflict nexus. His dissertation is a study of the domestic basis of foreign policy behavior in the post-Soviet states.

Conference paper:

Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation of the Post-Communist World

Paper in PDF format.

John O’Loughlin, Geography and Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado at Boulder.

John O’Loughlin (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, 1973) is Professor of Geography and Faculty Research Associate in the Institute of Behavioral Science. He has a long-standing interest in spatial analysis and has published articles on this subject in the leading geographical journals. His research on the topic has been funded by the National Science Foundation and with Michael Ward, he has applied spatial analysis to the diffusion of democracy. He is exploring a combination of spatial analytical and ecological inferential methods to try to understand the basis for the electoral success of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany. His other major research focus currently in the transition to democracy in contemporary Russia and the nature of the post-Soviet political and economic cleavages.

Conference paper:

John O'Loughlin, Can King’s ecological inference method answer a social scientific puzzle: Who voted for the Nazi party in Weimar Germany?, Annals, Association of American Geography, Vol. 90, (2000), forthcoming.
In PDF or Word format.
Figure 1 (JPEG) and Figure 2 (GIF).
Additional maps.

Luc Anselin, Agricultural Economics and Wendy Tam Cho, Political Science, University of Illinois-Urbana

Luc Anselin (PhD, Cornell 1980) is Professor of Economics and Adjunct Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois since summer 1999. Previously, he has held posts at Ohio State University, University of California at Santa Barbara, West Virginia University and University of Texas at Dallas. His dissertation on Spatial Econometrics was the first major statement on the extension of regression into the spatial domain and it remains the core work in the field. For the past 15 years, Anselin has developed and upgraded the major statistical package for the analysis of spatially-based data, SpaceStat, and its most recent version (1.90) incorporates an interface with the most popular GIS package, ArcView. Anselin has authored over one hundred scientific publications in all the major geography and regional science journals. Professor Anselin is considered the leading spatial analyst in North America and he has agreed to present a workshop on SpaceStat while attending the conference.

Conference paper:

Spatial Effects and Ecological Inference

Paper in PDF format.

In order to make public policy recommendations, public health officials routinely require forecasts of age-country-gender-disease-specific mortality well into the future. Such forecasts are very difficult to reliably calculate because of the poor quality of the available data and the long forecast horizons. We present forecasting methods that dramatically improve upon previously used techniques. The key to our approach is a hierarchical model that partially pools across age groups and countries, and allows for the incorporation of substantive knowledge about public health in a relatively straightforward way.