Richard J. Stoll's Web Page

Greetings! This is a pretty barebones personal home page.  I have developed it primarily to make my datasets and other research accessible.

You can see something more about me under the faculty profiles in the Rice University Political Science Department website. You can also see my current vita (note: this is a .pdf document).

I have two beautiful granddaughters; their names are Alice and Natalie. The link is a song by Scott Miller (see below) that summarizes my hopes for them: For Alice and Natalie.

My collaboration with Devika Subramanian (Computer Science) and Chris Bronk (University of Houston) is documented at Predicting conflict and tracking terrorist networks using online news.

Current Research

I have 2 current data-based projects:

War for Justice

This is a collaboration with Richard Eichenberg of Tufts University and Pierangelo Isernia of the University of Siena. People who respond "yes" to the question "Is war sometimes necessary to achieve justice?" are more likely to support increases in defense spending. We are seeking to understand what factors explain the answer to the war for justice question at the aggregate level. We will be using survey data from over 50 countries to try to determine what accounts for the response to that question.

Social Media and Public Attitudes

This is a collaboration with Devika Submaranian of Rice's Computer Science Department. A number of people have used social media to chart public opinion. But there are issues about using these data that are not fully appreciated. We have about one million Tweets that took place during Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution of 2014. You cannot simply use all these Tweets to chart the rise and fall of opinion on the Umbrella Revolution. First of all, almost half of the Tweets are generated by Bots. As well, a number of other Tweets are generated by news agencies. So we are working to devise means of culling out those Tweets that represent actual opinion on the Umbrella Revoluion.

Teaching

I also maintain webpages for the undergraduate courses I regularly teach (usually every year): I also have class webpages for some of the courses I teach irregularly: Be advised, however, that I only work on these pages when I teach these courses; in the “off season,” they may look a bit disorganized!

I am also fortunate to be a faculty associate at Jones College. While all the residential colleges at Rice are both special and unique, Jones is the best! JIBA!! (G-rated version: Jones Is Better than Anyone).

This is my children's worst nightmare. Yes I know it's MySpace, but the point is still valid.

One more thing, and this is important... if you don't like Scott Miller, you don't like rock and roll. And if you don't like rock and roll, well there's really not much hope for you.

Research

The Acceptability of War and Support for Defense Spending

Richard Eichenberg and I have a forthcoming piece in the Journal of Conflict Resolution:

Eichenberg, R. C., & Stoll, R. J. (forthcoming).The Acceptability of War and Support for Defense Spending Evidence from Fourteen Democracies, 2004-2013. Journal of Conflict Resolution.

This file esbuild.zip contains the files necessary to replicate the analysis in the article. The following are contained in the the zip file: 

Replication materials for 
Eichenberg, Richard C. and Richard J. Stoll. Forthcoming.
The Acceptability of War and Support for Defense Spending
Evidence from Fourteen Democracies, 2004-2013.
Journal of Conflict Resolution.

File               Description
------------       -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
readme.txt         documents files in replication package

esbuild.log        log file to create esbuild.dta.
		           There are 3 input datasets (not included):
		           dataset                        description
		           -----------------------------  ----------------------------------------------
		           sipri8812.dta                  SIPRI military expenditure database, 1988-2012
		           tts-ees-ttl 2002-2012 8.1.dta  Transatlantic Trends data 2002-2012
		           TT13_july24_2013.dta           Transatlantic Trends data 2013
             
                   Note that the .log file contains the result of describe, summary, and
                   codebook commands for the entire dataset.

esbuild.dta        Stata13/SE dataset.  It contains all the variables used in the analysis and
                   all the variables that were used to create the analysis variables.
                   
replicate.do       Stata .do file to replicate all the analysis in the paper and its
                   appendices.  Note: to create the multi-column tables the .ado file
                   outreg was used; to replicate these tables you must install outreg
                   (use the command ssc install outreg) before you run this .do file.

esappend.docx      Word document that contains all tables from Appendix (Appendices 1-10)

Gender Difference or Parallel Publics?

Richard Eichenberg and I published a piece on gender differences in support for defense spending: Eichenberg, R. C., & Stoll, R. J. (2012). Gender Difference or Parallel Publics? The Dynamics of Defense Spending Opinions in the United States, 1965-2007. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 56(2), 331-348. doi:10.1177/0022002711420983.

The file gendiff.zip contains the files necessary to replicate the analysis in the article. The following are contained in the the zip file: 

File               Content
genddiff.do        .do file to replicate Figure 1 & Table 2.
genddiff.log       .log file with results
genddiff.dta       .dta file: data for analysis
bnsupp.gph         Graph: Male and female net support
bbdiff.gph         Graph: Difference in male & female net support
bcombin.wmf        Combines both graphs into one
genddiff.txt       outreg2 output of regression results for Table 2

Was Leo Durocher Right?

I published a chapter called "Was Leo Durocher Right? Do Nice States Finish Last?" in Glenn Palmer (ed.). 2008. Causes and Consequences of International Conflict: Data, Methods and Theory. London, England. Routledge, pp. 165-185.

The file nicestate.dta is a Stata .dta file with the data used for Table 3 and the file nicestate.do will replicate the logit results displayed in Table 3.

War President: The Approval Ratings of George W. Bush

Richard Eichenberg and I (with the assistance of Matthew Lebo) published a paper analyzing the factors that account for the approval ratings of President Bush. It appeared in the December, 2006 issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (volume 50, number 6, pp. 783-808). The .zip file warpres.zip contains the files needed to replicate the figures and analyses in the article. The zip archive contains the following files: 


readme.txt   - file containing this text.

fpccc.dta    - Stata data file with most of the data.

frac88.dta   - Stata data file with fractionally differenced data.

charts.do    - Stata .do file to produce figures in the manuscript.

tables234.do - Stata .do file to produce results in Tables 2,3, and 4.

appen.do     - Stata .do file to produce results in the Appendix.

Four Way Street? Saudi Arabia's Behavior Among the Superpowers, 1966-1999

In October 2004, Devika Subramanian and I completed a paper for the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. Using events data, we trace the interactions of Saudi Arabia with China, Russia, and the United States from 1966 through 1999. One technique that we use in this paper is vector autoregression. In the paper we report only a subset of the coefficients from this analysis. The paper is here. The complete set of results is available as a .pdf file.

The Political Fortunes of War: Iraq and the Domestic Standing of President George W. Bush

In July, 2004, Richard C. Eichenberg and I wrote a monograph on the impact of the war in Iraq on President Bush's job approval ratings. We also predict his approval on Iraq. This is published by The Foreign Policy Centre in London, England. We have also put together a website that contains supplementary materials, including the dataset and a complete listing of the results of the analysis.

We later expanded this research and it was published in 2006 in the Journal of Conflict Resolution as War President: The Approval Ratings of George W. Bush; see above for the data used in the article.

Representing Defense: Democratic Control of the Defense Budget in the United States and Western Europe

The August 2003 issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Volume 47, 4 contains an article by Richard C. Eichenberg of Tufts University and myself that predicts support for defense spending, and changes for defense spending in five Western countries from about 1960 to the present. The file repdef.zip contains the following: 


Appendix.doc    - The full appendix from the paper.

extratables.doc - Additional tables that were cut from the final version of the paper.

figure1.xls     - Figure 1, but with different colors for each country.

tables.do       - Stata .do file to reproduce Tables 1 and 2 in the paper.

repdef.dta      - Stata7 (regular version) file with the data.
and a readme file with this list. By the way, the order of the authors is not simply alphabetical. Ike was the driving force behind this paper. Thanks Ike for letting me be part of this.

Examining Conflict Escalation within the Civilization Context

Sean Bolks and I researched the empirical validity of Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" conjecture. Our work was published in 2003 in Conflict Management and Peace Science, volume 20, issue 2. The file clash.zip contains the Stata .dta file (version 10) and a .do file to replicate the results in Table 2.

Events, Patterns, and Analysis: Forecasting International Conflict in the Twenty-First Century

Devika Subramanian of Rice's Computer Science Department and I are engaged in a project to both predict and understand the outbreak of serious international conflict. Some of our research has been funded by the National Science Foundation's Information Technology Research Initiative. Our research (including a link to the text of the proposal) is described on a page at Rice's Department of Computer Science.

In October 2002, I had the opportunity to present the plan for our research at a workshop "Computer-Aided Methods for International Conflict Resolution" held at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Vienna, Austria. You can see the position paper that I presented at that conference [note: this is a pdf document; you need Adobe Acrobat to read it]. This paper has since been published as:

Subramanian, Devika and Richard J. Stoll. 2006. Events, Patterns, and Analysis. In Robert Trappl (ed.) Programming for Peace: Computer-Aided Methods for International Conflict Resolution and Prevention . New York: Springer, pp. 145-160.

Collaborative Research on Updating the Militarized Interstate Dispute Data Set

I was one of 12 PIs involved in updating the Correlates of War Project Militarized Interstate Dispute dataset. The previous version (2.1) covered the years 1816-1992. The new version (3.01) extended the dataset to cover the time period 1993-2001. I also was involved in the development of version 4 of the MID data. These data are available at the Correlates of War Project website.

The Arms Acquisition Process

Sean Bolks and I wrote an article called "The Arms Acquisition Process: The Effect of Internal and External Constraints on Arms Race Dynamics." It was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, volume 44, number 5 (October 2000). Here is a Stata .do file, and the Stata .dta file for Table 1 in the paper. Here is a Stata .do file, and the Stata .dta file for Table 2 in the paper.

Blitzkrieg Simulation

I published an article called "The Russians are Coming! A Computer Simulation" in Armed Forces and Society, voume 16, number 2 (Winter 1990). Below are links to various files related to the simulation used in that article.

EARTH

With Thomas R. Cusack I built a computer simulation of a realist world. It is called EARTH (Exploring Alternative Realpolitik Theses). The simulation is based on the simulation known as the "chicken coop" which was developed by Stuart Bremer and Mike Milhalka (see Bremer, Stuart and Michael Mihalka. 1977. Machiavelli in Machina: or Politics Among Hexagons. In Deutsch, K., Fritsch, B., Jaguaribe, H. & Markovits, S. (Eds.) Problems of world modeling: Political and Social Implications. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing, pp. 303 - 338.) I have published a number of pieces using this simulation. The most recent is "Civil Engineering: Does a Realist World Influence the Onset of Civil Wars?" It appears in a forthcoming special issue of Simulation and Gaming edited by Mark A. Boyer (thanks Mark for your support and encouragement). See my current vita for other publications that use EARTH.

This describes the parameters that are used to run EARTH.