Foreign policy makers and international relations scholars have become increasingly interested in the relationship between democracy and war. In this book, the author argues that the international relations of democratic states are best understood in the context of the interaction of democratic and international politics. Elections are an essential institution of democratic states, while war is a defining element of international politics. This book examines the interaction of these two elemental phenomena. All state leaders must deal simultaneously with internal and external pressures. The conjunction of domestic electoral pressures and international pressures for war presents an acute form of this dilemma. Those who support increasing democratic influence on foreign policy have argued that this influence would make states more peaceful, while others have asserted that it would make foreign policy more volatile. The author shows that democratic publics have been vulnerable to excessive enthusiasm for war, but that this enthusiasm is tempered in an electoral environment by the ability of politically legitimate antiwar leaders to increase the domestic costs of going to war. Democratic leaders may have an electoral incentive to seek out international conflict, but they also have a strong motivation not to allow such conflicts to escalate to war when elections are imminent. The author also argues that the transparency of electoral politics in a democracy can lead to changes in the behavior of other states. Electoral institutions serve as an effective commitment mechanism for democratic states, and other states want to avoid contributing to the favorable electoral prospects of hawkish candidates. The author supports his argument with both structured case studies and analysis of the aggregate experience of all the democratic states over the past two centuries. He shows that despite variation in public attitudes toward international conflict, democratic states have engaged in significantly fewer wars in the period leading up to elections than in other parts of their electoral cycles.

Quantifying the Qualitative presents a systematic approach to comparative case analysis based on insights from information theory. This new method, which requires minimal quantitative skills, helps students, policymakers, professionals, and scholars learn more from comparative cases. The approach avoids the limitations of traditional statistics in the small-n context and allows analysts to systematically assess and compare the impact of a set of factors on case outcomes with easy-to-use analytics. Rigorous tools reduce bias, improve the knowledge gained from case studies, and provide straightforward metrics for effectively communicating results to a range of readers and leaders.

The Survivor's Guide to R provides a gentle, but thorough, introduction to R. It is an ideal supplement to any introductory statistics text or a practical field guide for those who want to use the powerful R language for statistical analysis in their own research. The book focuses on providing students with the real-world R skills that are often hard to get to in statistics classes: basic data management and manipulation, and working with R graphics. The book is designed to get students with little or no background in statistics or programming started on R within the context of a statistics class, and to ensure that they have acquired functional R skills that they can continue to use as they move on to their own projects. The book begins with a straightforward approach to understanding R objects, and then moves systematically through the use of R to transform, sort, and aggregate data; to work with complex textual and date/time data; and to effectively build on R's default graphics capabilities to produce highly customized and effective graphics. It focuses on working with real-world data, with - on reading data in different formats and the challenges of missing data. This book is intended for those with little to no statistics or programming experience---students and other new users who are likely to find their first encounter with R more than a little intimidating. It is written in an accessible and sympathetic style that makes minimal assumptions about user skills, and provides frequent warnings about common pitfalls that must be avoided along the road to R mastery.