Stephen Mark Mitchell
Biographic Data
| ID | 1068292 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen Mark Mitchell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Mitchell |
| SIGNATURE | MITCHELL S M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Iowa |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3804-9259 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1832 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 19 |
How Border Disputes Influence Disaster Response
This study examines how governments, international actors (states and international organizations), and non-state actors (non-governmental organizations) respond to disasters, focusing on whether response is distinct in border areas, in areas with ongoing territorial claims, and in areas with settled borders. The theory considers the role of state capacity and strategic importance of geographic areas to help understand whether and how government …
State promotion of global women’s rights in the Universal Periodic Review
This study investigates the characteristics of countries that actively promote global women’s rights, focusing on their participation in the Universal Periodic Review process at the United Nations Human Rights Council. The UPR process allows states to make voluntary recommendations on various human rights issues, including gender equality. By analyzing which states provide multiple recommendations on women’s rights, we can infer their commitment …
Testing the Waters
While the democratic peace literature finds that pairs of democracies face lower risks for interstate conflict than other regime pairings, the maritime conflict literature often finds that democratic dyads have the highest risks for maritime diplomatic conflicts out of all regime pairings. Despite this surprising finding, there remains a gap for understanding what specific political mechanisms are driving democracies to engage in maritime conflic…
A Text Analysis of News Media Framing of Government Response to the 2023 Türkiye–Syria Earthquake
The February 2023 Türkiye–Syria Earthquake had a profound impact on political, economic, and social life in Türkiye. Despite criticism about government disaster response, the government of Türkiye won an election 3 months later. We examine variance in media coverage of government disaster responses with Structural Topic Modeling of 12,268 articles in five pro‐ and anti‐government newspapers in Türkiye (Anadolu Ajansi, Hurriyet, Sozcu, Cumhuriyet,…
The Issue Correlates of War (Icow) Identity Claims Dataset, 1946-2021
This article introduces the Issue Correlates of War Identity Claims Dataset. An identity claim occurs when two states diplomatically contest the treatment of an ethnic group that both states share. A state that advances such a claim (i.e. the challenger) demands that the other state (i.e. the target) either: (i) change its domestic treatment of the group, (ii) grant the group independence, or (iii) allow the group to reunite with the challenger s…
How climate volatility influences human rights
Patterns of government disaster policy response in Peru
The Three R’s of Cedaw Commitment
Human rights treaties have mixed success records for improving member states’ human rights behavior. Yet the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has been successful for improving women’s rights. However, few CEDAW analyses account for the influence of reservations on state compliance with the treaty. This study develops a theoretical approach drawn from the opposability (vs. permissibility) school of…
Do birds of a feather deter better? Cultural affinity and alliance deterrence
Using a new latent measure of cultural affinity in military alliances (1816–2011), this study shows that states are less likely to be targets of militarized disputes or wars if they are members of defensive alliances with more culturally similar states. The theory posits that alliances between culturally similar states are designed with rules and norms that reflect the community’s shared interests, which helps the members handle intra-alliance co…
Does government response to natural disasters explain violence? The case of the Sendero Luminoso and conflict in Peru
Objective We consider how the Peruvian government's responses to natural disaster events shaped political violence patterns from 1989 to 2020. Methods We gather data on government disaster response and compare the effect of positive disaster responses, such as reconstruction and regulation of domestic/international aid, and negative disaster responses, such as neglect or placing restrictions on movement near the affected areas, on violent conflic…
Cross-border troubles? Interstate river conflicts and intrastate violence
Insecure fisheries
We examine greed and grievance mechanisms that connect illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing and piracy. We use several cases (e.g. Somalia, Nigeria) to illustrate these mechanisms and empirically examine the relationship between IUU fishing and state-year piracy events from 1990 to 2015. We find that countries experiencing significant levels of IUU fishing face much greater risks for piracy. We also evaluate several mediating condit…
Forum
This forum examines whether scholars’ access to networks in the international studies profession is gendered and if so, the consequences of those networks for personal and professional success. Academic networks that encompass both professional and personal connections have been proposed as one solution to chilly climate issues because they provide a dual function of enhancing scholarly productivity and inclusion in the profession. The articles i…
Gender, language, and representation in the United States Senate
We explore how gendered language in Senate floor debates evolves between the 101st and 109th sessions (N=229,526 speeches). We hypothesize that female Senators speak like women in the general population, that their speeches focus on traditionally designated women’s issues, and that they use female linguistic strategies found in the general population when discussing low politics or women’s issues. We also expect women to speak like legislators, a…
Disasters and the dynamics of interstate rivalry
This article examines how disasters influence conflict dynamics in interstate rivalries. Building on insights from the disaster, rivalry, and diversionary conflict literatures, the authors argue that disasters act as political shocks that disrupt a rivalry relationship. Hostility levels in rivalries are stable over time and shift only through major shocks. While the rivalry literature suggests that some shocks may lead to peace, the authors argue…
Judicialization of the Sea
Based on a comprehensive empirical analysis of maritime disputes during the twentieth century, this Article argues that international courts cast a shadow that markedly changes bargaining by potential litigating states. In particular, the filing of optional declarations under Article 287 of UNCLOS increases states’ use of non-binding methods of dispute settlement, and the Article theorizes that this occurs because the declarations credibly threat…
Climate bones of contention
Many scholars examine the relationship between climate variability and intrastate conflict onset. While empirical findings in this literature are mixed, we know less about how climate changes increase the risks for conflicts between countries. This article studies climate variability using the issue approach to world politics. We examine whether climate variability influences the onset and militarization of interstate diplomatic conflicts and whe…
Gender, seniority, and self-citation practices in political science
Natural Disasters, Forced Migration, and Conflict
Understanding the connections between environmental change, migration, and conflict is urgent as natural disasters increase in frequency and intensity. Countries that experience natural disasters face greater risks for intrastate conflicts, especially for rapid-onset disasters. Migration is one response to these environmental changes. Existing literature suggests that environmental migration can cause violent conflict as migrants lose livelihoods…
Clashes at Sea
Maritime disputes feature prominently in global politics, but we lack full understanding about how they arise and why they are militarized. China’s maritime conflicts with neighboring states (for example, Senkaku/Diaoyu, Spratly Islands) have generated over a dozen militarized clashes at sea since 1991. Confrontations in the Kerch Strait between Russia and Ukraine in November 2018 created similar concerns about the escalation of the situation to …
How Many Citations to Women Is “Enough”? Estimates of Gender Representation in Political Science
Recent studies identified gendered citation gaps in political science journal articles, with male scholars being less likely to cite work by female scholars in comparison to their female peers. Although journal editors, editorial boards, and political scientists are becoming more aware of implicit biases and adopting strategies to remedy them, we know less about the proper baselines for citations in subfields and research areas of political scien…
Energy resources and the risk of conflict in shared river basins
This study examines the effect of energy resources on the chances for militarized conflict, water related conflict and cooperation events, and cooperative river treaties between pairs of states on shared international river basins. We examine trade-offs that riparian states can make between energy resources such as oil or natural gas and fresh water resources. Integrating upstream and downstream states’ geographical position in a river basin with…
Conflict Management in Land, River, and Maritime Claims
Why do disputants favor some conflict management strategies when managing certain territorial claim types—land, river, or maritime—but not others? We propose that state interests—defined via claim characteristics and interdependence—and transaction costs (i.e., the challenges associated with aggregating state preferences over outcomes) differ across claim types. These differences then incentivize states to cede varying levels of control over clai…
Shifting Standards for Political Methodologists? Historical Trends in the Society for Political Methodology
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Gendered Citation Patterns across Political Science and Social Science Methodology Fields
Accumulated evidence identifies discernible gender gaps across many dimensions of professional academic careers including salaries, publication rates, journal placement, career progress, and academic service. Recent work in political science also reveals gender gaps in citations, with articles written by men citing work by other male scholars more often than work by female scholars. This study estimates the gender gap in citations across politica…
Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions, 1815-1944
This article introduces the Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) dataset. We begin by describing the rationale for collecting the ATOP data, its scope, and some general coding rules for the project. Then we offer some descriptive statistics for phase one of the dataset, which covers the years 1815-1944, and reveal some interesting trends in alliance politics. Finally, we replicate a study of alliance formation originally conducted by…
Bones of Contention
Contentious issues are important sources of militarized conflict. This article advances an issue-based approach to world politics, focusing on disagreements over territory, maritime zones, and cross-border rivers. We characterize militarized conflict and peaceful techniques as substitutable foreign policy tools that states can adopt to resolve disagreements over issues, and we present hypotheses to account for issue management based on issue sali…
Reevaluating Alliance Reliability
Previously reported empirical evidence suggests that when conflict arises, military alliances are not reliable; state leaders should only expect their alliance partners to join them in war about 25% of the time. Yet, theoretical arguments explaining the choices of leaders to form cooperative agreements are at odds with such empirical evidence. This puzzling gap between theory and evidence motivates a reconsideration of previous measures of allian…
Gendered Citation Patterns across Political Science and Social Science Methodology Fields
Accumulated evidence identifies discernible gender gaps across many dimensions of professional academic careers including salaries, publication rates, journal placement, career progress, and academic service. Recent work in political science also reveals gender gaps in citations, with articles written by men citing work by other male scholars more often than work by female scholars. This study estimates the gender gap in citations across politica…
A Kantian System? Democracy and Third-Party Conflict Resolution
While constructivist scholars have recognized an important role for norms in international relations, they have not considered the changing proportion of democratic states in the international system as a potential source of norm formation. I argue that democratic norms become international norms as the proportion of democratic states in the international system increases, focusing on the democratic norm of third party dispute resolution. I reach…
International Institutions and Compliance with Agreements
The ultimate litmus test of compliance theories occurs in situations where states' interests are directly opposed, such as competing interstate claims over territory, maritime areas, and cross‐border rivers. This article considers the extent to which the involvement of international institutions in the settlement of contentious issues between states bolsters compliance with agreements that are struck. Institutions may influence the prospects for …
Rivalry and Diversionary Uses of Force
Scholars have argued for some time that the rally ’round the flag phenomenon creates incentives for political leaders to use military force to divert attention away from domestic turmoil. It is hypothesized that a state’s strategic or historical context conditions its use of military force abroad, and that the probability of diversionary uses of force is higher in opportunity-rich environments of enduring rivalry. Empirical analyses lend support …
Issue indivisibility and territorial claims
Beyond Territorial Contiguity
Scholars of international politics have been slow to address the fundamental issues that ground interstate conflict. Territory has frequently been cited as a primary source of contention among states, but it remains only one issue and not even the one most prevalent in the post‐World War II time period. We take the first step toward understanding the broader theoretical link between regime type, issues, and militarized conflict by collecting new …
Evolution in Democracy-War Dynamics
This article explores the evolutionary and endogenous relationship between democracy and war at the system level. Building on Kant, the authors argue that the rules and norms of behavior within and between democracies become more prevalent in international relations as the number of democracies in the system increases. The authors use Kalman filter analysis, which allows for the parameters in the models to vary over time. The results support the …
A Supply Side Theory of Mediation1
We develop and test a theory of the supply side of third-party conflict management. Building on Kydd's (2003) model of mediation, which shows that bias enhances mediator credibility, we offer three complementary mechanisms that may enable mediator credibility. First, democratic mediators face costs for deception in the conflict management process. Second, a vibrant global democratic community supports the norms of unbiased and nonviolent conflict…
Gendered Citation Patterns in International Relations Journals
This paper applies a methodology utilized in economics to study citation patterns in two International Studies Association journals. The paper analyzes articles published in International Studies Quarterly (ISQ) and International Studies Perspectives (ISP) in 2005. Comparisons are made based on the sex of the authors of articles and the sex of the cited authors in each paper's bibliography. Empirical analyses suggest that male authors of ISQ and …
Presidential Uses of Force during the Cold War
A previous version of this article was presented at the 1999 North American Meeting of the Peace Science Society International, Ann Arbor, MI. A lengthier version of the article is available at http://www.fsu.edu/~polisci/wksp_papers/workingpapers/wp2000.htm. We would like to thank Matt Baum, Patrick Brandt, Ashley Leeds, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts. A replication data set will be deposited with t…
The International Court of Justice and the World's Three Legal Systems
This paper seeks to understand why some countries accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) more readily than others. The theory focuses on institutional differences between the world's major legal systems: civil law, common law, and Islamic law. Important characteristics of these legal systems (stare decisis, bona fides, pacta sunt servanda) are integrated in an expressive theory of adjudication, which focuses on how ad…
IO Mediation of Interstate Conflicts
Regional and global intergovernmental organizations have grown both in number and scope, yet their role and effectiveness as conflict managers is not fully understood. Previous research efforts tend to categorize organizations solely by the scope of their membership, which obscures important sources of variation in institutional design at both the regional and global levels. International organizations will be more successful conflict managers if…
Fragmented Governance of International Rivers
Despite warnings of interstate conflict over shared water resources, states are reaching hundreds of treaties and agreements over their international rivers. We have extensive knowledge about the negotiations process of individual treaties, but there is a paucity of systematic analysis of the forces influencing treaty formation. In addition, the few quantitative studies examining the formation of agreements fail to consider the different factors …
Foreign Direct Investment and Territorial Disputes
This study evaluates the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and interstate conflict, focusing on four prominent causal mechanisms: the declining benefits of territorial conquest, increasing preference similarity, increasing opportunity costs of violence, and improved information signaling. Empirical analyses show that new territorial issues are less likely to arise as global levels of FDI increase, although monadic and bilateral…
Conflict management of riparian disputes
Contentious Issues as Opportunities for Diversionary Behavior
Scholars have long been fascinated by the potential for leaders to engage in diversionary behavior, where leaders use militarized force abroad to distract their publics from various forms of domestic economic and political turmoil. While there is some evidence that diversionary behavior depends on contextual factors such as regime type, opportunities to use force, and interstate rivalry, we do not know whether and how diversionary strategies are …
From territorial claims to identity claims
The Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) research project began nearly 20 years ago by collecting data on territorial claims in South America. Since then, the ICOW territorial claims dataset has expanded to cover the entire world, while ICOW has collected new data on river claims and maritime claims and is beginning a new project on identity claims. This article discusses the development and expansion of ICOW data, illustrating how the additional datas…
Issue Rivalries
This article expands upon the traditional interstate rivalry concept by focusing on two conceptual dimensions of interstate rivalry: issues and militarization. The first dimension captures the number of distinct issues that characterize a dyadic interstate relationship, such as repeated clashes between states over border disputes, maritime zones, or cross-border rivers. The second dimension is very similar to the dispute density approach to rival…
Natural Disasters, Forced Migration, and Conflict
Understanding the connections between environmental change, migration, and conflict is urgent as natural disasters increase in frequency and intensity. Countries that experience natural disasters face greater risks for intrastate conflicts, especially for rapid-onset disasters. Migration is one response to these environmental changes. Existing literature suggests that environmental migration can cause violent conflict as migrants lose livelihoods…
Ruling the Sea
Two primary mechanisms for managing competitive interstate claims to maritime areas are evaluated: the creation of private ownership of maritime zones in the form of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and the creation of a global institution, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to establish standards for maritime claims and dispute resolution procedures. Analyses of maritime claims in the Western Hemisphere and Europe from …
Resource Curse in Reverse
Conflict scholars have argued that natural resources, such as oil, diamonds, and gemstones, may increase the chances for civil wars because rebels can sustain their organizations by looting resources and because certain types of resources, such as oil, create weaker state governments that are less capable of putting down insurgencies. Natural resources like oil also raise the value of capturing the state through war. However, empirical studies ty…
Heeding Ray's Advice
We submit our recent systemic democratic peace research to the control variable doctrine of James Lee Ray, as codified in his 2003 treatise. In particular, we seek to determine whether international institutions intervene in the relationship between the democratic community's strength and the use and effectiveness of third party conflict management, whether hegemony is a competing explanation of third party settlement, and whether our extant mode…
Organizations, Class and Control
Evolution in Democracy-War Dynamics
This article explores the evolutionary and endogenous relationship between democracy and war at the system level. Building on Kant, the authors argue that the rules and norms of behavior within and between democracies become more prevalent in international relations as the number of democracies in the system increases. The authors use Kalman filter analysis, which allows for the parameters in the models to vary over time. The results support the …
Beyond Territorial Contiguity
Scholars of international politics have been slow to address the fundamental issues that ground interstate conflict. Territory has frequently been cited as a primary source of contention among states, but it remains only one issue and not even the one most prevalent in the post‐World War II time period. We take the first step toward understanding the broader theoretical link between regime type, issues, and militarized conflict by collecting new …
Reevaluating Alliance Reliability
Previously reported empirical evidence suggests that when conflict arises, military alliances are not reliable; state leaders should only expect their alliance partners to join them in war about 25% of the time. Yet, theoretical arguments explaining the choices of leaders to form cooperative agreements are at odds with such empirical evidence. This puzzling gap between theory and evidence motivates a reconsideration of previous measures of allian…
Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions, 1815-1944
This article introduces the Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) dataset. We begin by describing the rationale for collecting the ATOP data, its scope, and some general coding rules for the project. Then we offer some descriptive statistics for phase one of the dataset, which covers the years 1815-1944, and reveal some interesting trends in alliance politics. Finally, we replicate a study of alliance formation originally conducted by…
Presidential Uses of Force during the Cold War
A previous version of this article was presented at the 1999 North American Meeting of the Peace Science Society International, Ann Arbor, MI. A lengthier version of the article is available at http://www.fsu.edu/~polisci/wksp_papers/workingpapers/wp2000.htm. We would like to thank Matt Baum, Patrick Brandt, Ashley Leeds, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts. A replication data set will be deposited with t…
A Kantian System? Democracy and Third-Party Conflict Resolution
While constructivist scholars have recognized an important role for norms in international relations, they have not considered the changing proportion of democratic states in the international system as a potential source of norm formation. I argue that democratic norms become international norms as the proportion of democratic states in the international system increases, focusing on the democratic norm of third party dispute resolution. I reach…
Rivalry and Diversionary Uses of Force
Scholars have argued for some time that the rally ’round the flag phenomenon creates incentives for political leaders to use military force to divert attention away from domestic turmoil. It is hypothesized that a state’s strategic or historical context conditions its use of military force abroad, and that the probability of diversionary uses of force is higher in opportunity-rich environments of enduring rivalry. Empirical analyses lend support …
Heeding Ray's Advice
We submit our recent systemic democratic peace research to the control variable doctrine of James Lee Ray, as codified in his 2003 treatise. In particular, we seek to determine whether international institutions intervene in the relationship between the democratic community's strength and the use and effectiveness of third party conflict management, whether hegemony is a competing explanation of third party settlement, and whether our extant mode…
Manna from Heaven or Forbidden Fruit? the (Ab) Use of Control Variables in Research on International Conflict
Model specification is a ubiquitous challenge in the social sciences. While this issue of Conflict Management and Peace Science is dedicated to addressing this topic in the context of research on international conflict, the discussion among the contributors also contains general lessons and debates relevant to statistical analyses of political, economic, and social phenomena. The reader might suspect that when Glenn Palmer first approached us wit…
Issue indivisibility and territorial claims
Cooperation in World Politics
Many scholars accept the important role international organizations (IOs) play in facilitating cooperation among states in world politics, yet there is disagreement about the theoretical mechanisms that best account for the positive correlation between shared IO memberships and cooperation. Institutionalists and Rationalists treat state preferences as fixed and emphasize the influence of IO memberships on interstate bargaining. In this view, IOs …
Conflict management of riparian disputes
Introduction to special issue
The International Court of Justice and the World's Three Legal Systems
This paper seeks to understand why some countries accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) more readily than others. The theory focuses on institutional differences between the world's major legal systems: civil law, common law, and Islamic law. Important characteristics of these legal systems (stare decisis, bona fides, pacta sunt servanda) are integrated in an expressive theory of adjudication, which focuses on how ad…
International Institutions and Compliance with Agreements
The ultimate litmus test of compliance theories occurs in situations where states' interests are directly opposed, such as competing interstate claims over territory, maritime areas, and cross‐border rivers. This article considers the extent to which the involvement of international institutions in the settlement of contentious issues between states bolsters compliance with agreements that are struck. Institutions may influence the prospects for …
IO Mediation of Interstate Conflicts
Regional and global intergovernmental organizations have grown both in number and scope, yet their role and effectiveness as conflict managers is not fully understood. Previous research efforts tend to categorize organizations solely by the scope of their membership, which obscures important sources of variation in institutional design at both the regional and global levels. International organizations will be more successful conflict managers if…
Bones of Contention
Contentious issues are important sources of militarized conflict. This article advances an issue-based approach to world politics, focusing on disagreements over territory, maritime zones, and cross-border rivers. We characterize militarized conflict and peaceful techniques as substitutable foreign policy tools that states can adopt to resolve disagreements over issues, and we present hypotheses to account for issue management based on issue sali…
Legal Systems and Variance in the Design of Commitments to the International Court of Justice
This paper explores the relationship between domestic legal systems and the design of commitments to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Empirical analyses demonstrate that civil law states are more willing to recognize the compulsory and compromissory jurisdiction of the World Court than common law or Islamic law states. Common law states place the highest number of reservations on their optional clause declarations, with the majority of t…
Introduction to CMPS Special Issue Building Synergies
How Democracies Keep the Peace
Some studies find that democratic states are more amenable to third party forms of conflict management, while other studies indicate that democracies are able to resolve contentious issues on their own through bilateral negotiations. Using data from the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project, the authors investigate peaceful and militarized conflict management strategies that democratic states employ to resolve contentious issues. Theoretically, …
Contentious Issues as Opportunities for Diversionary Behavior
Scholars have long been fascinated by the potential for leaders to engage in diversionary behavior, where leaders use militarized force abroad to distract their publics from various forms of domestic economic and political turmoil. While there is some evidence that diversionary behavior depends on contextual factors such as regime type, opportunities to use force, and interstate rivalry, we do not know whether and how diversionary strategies are …
Issue Rivalries
This article expands upon the traditional interstate rivalry concept by focusing on two conceptual dimensions of interstate rivalry: issues and militarization. The first dimension captures the number of distinct issues that characterize a dyadic interstate relationship, such as repeated clashes between states over border disputes, maritime zones, or cross-border rivers. The second dimension is very similar to the dispute density approach to rival…
Facilitating Treaty Formation to Govern International Rivers
An introduction is presented for a special section of articles about treaty formation, types of treaties negotiated such as those related to water rights, and conditions that facilitate treaty formation
Designing Public Policies
Political science (66 works) · Law (57 works) · Law (43 works) · Sociology (40 works) · Politics (38 works) · Economics (31 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (25 works) · Political economy (22 works) · Psychology (20 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (19 works)