Thomas Plümper
Biographic Data
| ID | 299376 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Plümper |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Plümper |
| SIGNATURE | PLÜMPER T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Essex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1461-0737 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 79 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1841 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 72 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 7 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 19 |
The Credibility Crisis in Science
A novel perspective on scientific fraud—how undisclosed “tweaks” to research designs and model specifications fuel the credibility crisis in science. In The Credibility Crisis in Science, leading social scientists Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer argue that the most impactful fraud is crucially under-recognized. While data fabrication and manipulation are widely recognized as fraudulent, “tweaks”—the intentional selection of research designs and …
Protest against Covid-19 containment policies in European countries
Protests against coronavirus policies have occurred in all European countries. The intensity of protest varies strongly, however. We explain this variation by strategic choices that protest organizers make to maintain the protest movement. Specifically, we argue that protest organizers pay heed to the dynamics of the pandemic in their country: the number of protest events is higher when and where mortality rates are lower and containment policies…
Polarized Politics
Protest against containment policies in U.S. states is fueled by two drivers: the stringency of containment policies and the partisan control over the governorship and legislatures in each state. In our analysis of the period from March 2020 to March 2022, we find more protest events in states fully controlled by Democrats than in Republican controlled states both in a sample consisting of all states and a balanced sample in which we constrain ob…
The Politics of Covid-19 Containment Policies in europe
Does ‘Data fudging’ explain the autocratic advantage? Evidence from the gap between Official Covid-19 mortality and excess mortality
Governments can underreport Covid-19 mortality to make their performance appear more successful than it is. Autocracies are more likely to 'fudge' these data since many autocratic regimes restrict media freedom and thus can prevent domestic media from reporting evidence of undercounting deaths. Autocracies also enjoy greater leverage over reporting health authorities to either fudge data or adopt restrictive definitions of what constitutes Covid-…
Lockdown policies and the dynamics of the first wave of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic in Europe
This paper follows European countries as they struggled through the first wave of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic. We analyze when countries were confronted with the virus, how long it took until the number of new infections peaked and at what level of infections that peak was achieved via social distancing and lockdown policies. Most European countries were able to successfully end the first wave of the pandemic – defined as a two-week incidence rate sm…
Women’s economic rights in developing countries and the gender gap in migration to Germany
There is a large variation across countries of origin in the gender composition of migrants coming to Germany. We argue that women’s economic rights in developing countries of origin have three effects on their migration prospects to a place like Germany that is far away and difficult to reach. First, the lower are women’s economic rights the fewer women have access to and control over the resources needed to migrate to Germany. Second, the lower…
The strategy of protest against Covid‐19 containment policies in Germany
OBJECTIVES: The article analyzes the epidemiological and political logics of protest against containment policies in Germany. To maximize the mobilization potential, protest organizers organize more protest events when Covid-19 mortality rates are low, the stringency of containment policies is high, and in districts in which the vote share of mainstream parties is traditionally low. METHOD: Using a negative binomial model, we analyze the number o…
The political science of Covid‐19
Political decisions, constellations, and behaviors exert a large influence of the dynamics of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (Sars‐CoV‐2) pandemic. Politics influences the choice of containment policies and the compliance with these policies—and therefore ultimately the epidemiological situation in each country, state, district, or even neighborhood. This introduction puts the articles collected in this special issue into the…
The logics of Covid‐19 travel restrictions between European countries
Objectives: The article analyzes the existence of bilateral travel restrictions between European countries during the second wave of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic. The paper tests three sets of theoretically derived predictions, which follow epidemiological, economic, and political logics. Method: We analyze a sample of directed bilateral travel restrictions between 27 European countries: 27.26 = 702 country dyads over a period of 6 months during the s…
Human rights violations and the gender gap in asylum recognition rates
During the recent European refugee crisis, more than two million people applied for asylum in Germany. Female applicants stand a higher chance to gain protection than male applicants. Whilst small on average, this gender gap in asylum recognition rates varies strongly across countries of origin which has remained little noticed. We analyse the gender gap in asylum recognition rates for the 56 major countries of origin of refugees whose asylum cla…
Covid-19 does not stop at open borders
Infectious diseases generate spatial dependence or contagion not only between individuals but also between geographical units. New infections in one local district do not just depend on properties of the district, but also on the strength of social ties of its population with populations in other districts and their own degree of infectiousness. We show that SARS-CoV-2 infections during the first wave of the pandemic spread across district border…
The sensitivity of sensitivity analysis
This article evaluates the reliability of sensitivity tests. Using Monte Carlo methods we show that, first, the definition of robustness exerts a large influence on the robustness of variables. Second and more importantly, our results also demonstrate that inferences based on sensitivity tests are most likely to be valid if determinants and confounders are almost uncorrelated and if the variables included in the true model exert a strong influenc…
Not so Harmless After All
The fixed-effects estimator is biased in the presence of dynamic misspecification and omitted within variation correlated with one of the regressors. We argue and demonstrate that fixed-effects estimates can amplify the bias from dynamic misspecification and that with omitted time-invariant variablesanddynamic misspecifications, the fixed-effects estimator can be more biased than the ‘naïve’ OLS model. We also demonstrate that the Hausman test do…
European integration and the race to the top in counterterrorist regulations
International terrorism can generate a 'race to the top' in counterterrorist regulations among countries potentially exposed to terrorist attacks. This 'regulatory competition' can be smoothed by international co-operation and an agreement on common minimum standards in counterterrorist regulations. We argue, and show empirically, that European Union members states have implemented a significantly lower number of counterterrorist regulations than…
Robustness Tests for Quantitative Research
The uncertainty that researchers face in specifying their estimation model threatens the validity of their inferences. In regression analyses of observational data, the 'true model' remains unknown, and researchers face a choice between plausible alternative specifications. Robustness testing allows researchers to explore the stability of their main estimates to plausible variations in model specifications. This highly accessible book presents th…
The double-edged sword of learning from disasters
Inequalities of Income and Inequalities of Longevity
Objectives. We examined the effects of market income inequality (income inequality before taxes and transfers) and income redistribution via taxes and transfers on inequality in longevity. Methods. We used life tables to compute Gini coefficients of longevity inequality for all individuals and for individuals who survived to at least 10 years of age. We regressed longevity inequality on market income inequality and income redistribution, and we c…
Spatial spill-overs from terrorism on tourism
W
In spatial econometrics,Wrefers to the matrix that weights the value of the spatially lagged variable of other units. As unimportant as it may appear,Wspecifies, or at least ought to specify, why and how other units of analysis affect the unit under observation. This article shows that theory must inform five crucial specification choices taken by researchers. Specifically, the connectivity variable employed inWmust capture the causal mechanism o…
Free-riding in alliances
We revisit the old and well-established theory of free-riding in military alliances. Existing empirical evidence infers free-riding from the larger military expenditures per gross domestic product (GDP) of countries of larger GDP. Yet, larger countries have broader military and geostrategic interests that result in larger defense burdens, thus creating an identification problem for existing tests of free-riding behavior. We therefore develop alte…
Terrorism and Counterterrorism
In this commentary, we make the case that the analysis of terrorism and counterterrorism must be based on an integrated theory that links both issues together. Terrorist groups’ ultimate goals must be distinguished from their strategic goals and the strategic logic by which they employ terror and select targets to further their ultimate goals. The strategic logic of terrorism is thus key to understanding patterns of terrorism and the counter-reac…
The “Peer-Effect” in Counterterrorist Policies
Existing accounts posit that defensively oriented counterterrorist policies create negative externalities and result in regulatory competition that induces governments to increasingly tighten their policies. We argue that rather than causing an unconditional global “race to the top,” spatial dependence in counterterrorist policies is limited to within groups of countries exposed to a similar level of threat from international terrorism. Countries…
Jahrbuch Für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie
Politische Integration
Panel data analysis in comparative politics
Re‐analyzing a study of Garrett and Mitchell (‘Globalization, government spending and taxation in the OECD’, European Journal of Political Research 39(2) (2001): 145–177), this article addresses four potential sources of problems in panel data analyses with a lagged dependent variable and period and unit dummies (the de facto Beck‐Katz standard). These are: absorption of cross‐sectional variance by unit dummies, absorption of time‐series variance…
Efficient Estimation of Time-Invariant and Rarely Changing Variables in Finite Sample Panel Analyses with Unit Fixed Effects
This paper suggests a three-stage procedure for the estimation of time-invariant and rarely changing variables in panel data models with unit effects. The first stage of the proposed estimator runs a fixed-effects model to obtain the unit effects, the second stage breaks down the unit effects into a part explained by the time-invariant and/or rarely changing variables and an error term, and the third stage reestimates the first stage by pooled OL…
The Gendered Nature of Natural Disasters
Natural disasters do not affect people equally. In fact, a vulnerability approach to disasters would suggest that inequalities in exposure and sensitivity to risk as well as inequalities in access to resources, capabilities, and opportunities systematically disadvantage certain groups of people, rendering them more vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters. In this article we address the specific vulnerability of girls and women with respect …
Model specification in the analysis of spatial dependence
The recent surge in studies analysing spatial dependence in political science has gone hand‐in‐hand with increased attention paid to the choice of estimation technique. In comparison, specification choice has been relatively neglected, even though it leads to equally, if not more, serious inference problems. In this article four specification issues are analysed. It is argued that to avoid biased estimates of the spatial effects, researchers need…
The Unequal Burden of War
Most combatants in armed conflict are men, so naturally men are the major direct victims of military operations. Yet armed conflicts have important indirect negative consequences on agriculture, infrastructure, public health provision, and social order. These indirect consequences are often overlooked and underappreciated. They also affect women-arguably more so than men. This article provides the first rigorous analysis of the impact of armed co…
Why is There No Race to the Bottom in Capital Taxation
This article explains the absence of a race to the bottom in capital taxation by analyzing fiscal competition under budget rigidities and tax equity constraints (fairness norms). We outline a political economic model of tax competition that treats the outcome of tax competition as one argument in the governments utility function, the others being public expenditure and tax equity. In accordance with previous theoretical research, tax competition …
Spatial Effects in Dyadic Data
Political units often spatially depend in their policy choices on other units. This also holds in dyadic settings where, as in much of international relations research, analysis focuses on the interaction or relation between a pair or dyad of two political units. Yet, with few exceptions, social scientists have analyzed contagion in monadic datasets only, consisting of individual political units. This article categorizes all possible forms of spa…
W
In spatial econometrics,Wrefers to the matrix that weights the value of the spatially lagged variable of other units. As unimportant as it may appear,Wspecifies, or at least ought to specify, why and how other units of analysis affect the unit under observation. This article shows that theory must inform five crucial specification choices taken by researchers. Specifically, the connectivity variable employed inWmust capture the causal mechanism o…
Not so Harmless After All
The fixed-effects estimator is biased in the presence of dynamic misspecification and omitted within variation correlated with one of the regressors. We argue and demonstrate that fixed-effects estimates can amplify the bias from dynamic misspecification and that with omitted time-invariant variablesanddynamic misspecifications, the fixed-effects estimator can be more biased than the ‘naïve’ OLS model. We also demonstrate that the Hausman test do…
Regulatory competition and international co-operation
Recent research has shown that regulatory competition does not necessarily lead to downward pressures on regulation, but may at times also push the level of regulation upwards. Extending David Vogel's 'California effect' argument, this article shows that such upward pressure may not only result directly from the dynamics of the competitive process but also from international co-operation. Evidence from two case studies on international capital ma…
The demand-side politics of EU enlargement
Most theoretical arguments about enlargement have sought to elucidate why the EU may have an interest in accepting CEECs. While these 'supply-side' arguments are essential building blocks of a comprehensive account of enlargement, they need to be complemented by a theory that seeks to understand the politics and economics of enlargement from a demand-side perspective. We show in a formal model how a transition country's demand for EU membership r…
Conditional Spatial Policy Dependence
The authors discuss how scholars can bring theories of spatial policy dependence and empirical model specifications closer in line so that the empirical analysis actually tests the theoretical predictions. Comprehensive theories of spatial policy dependence typically suggest that the jurisdictions receiving spatial stimuli systematically differ in their exposure to such signals as a function of the intensity of their interaction with other jurisd…
Fixed-Effects Vector Decomposition
This article reinforces our 2007 Political Analysis publication in demonstrating that the fixed-effects vector decomposition (FEVD) procedure outperforms any other estimator in estimating models that suffer from the simultaneous presence of time-varying variables correlated with unobserved unit effects and time-invariant variables. We compare the finite-sample properties of FEVD not only to the Hausman-Taylor estimator but also to the pretest est…
The friend of my enemy is my enemy
Terrorism is an instrument for groups that cannot achieve their political goals legally. One important strategic function of terrorism is to weaken the government – either directly by attacking representatives or supporters of the government or indirectly by causing a political response that is unpopular among the population. Often, however, political stability of the home government is buttressed by foreign powers. In this case, the terrorists c…
The “Peer-Effect” in Counterterrorist Policies
Existing accounts posit that defensively oriented counterterrorist policies create negative externalities and result in regulatory competition that induces governments to increasingly tighten their policies. We argue that rather than causing an unconditional global “race to the top,” spatial dependence in counterterrorist policies is limited to within groups of countries exposed to a similar level of threat from international terrorism. Countries…
Earthquake Propensity and the Politics of Mortality Prevention
Lockdown policies and the dynamics of the first wave of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic in Europe
This paper follows European countries as they struggled through the first wave of the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic. We analyze when countries were confronted with the virus, how long it took until the number of new infections peaked and at what level of infections that peak was achieved via social distancing and lockdown policies. Most European countries were able to successfully end the first wave of the pandemic – defined as a two-week incidence rate sm…
The analysis of policy convergence, or
Political science research on policy convergence has largely remained inconclusive. While many studies found support for the convergence hypothesis, an almost equally large number of studies rejected it. Convergence thus could be a less general phenomenon than many theorists believe. This article identifies a second possible explanation. The variance approach, which dominates political science research on policy convergence, is likely to lead to …
International Terrorism and the Clash of Civilizations
Huntington referred to a ‘clash of civilizations’ revealing itself in international terrorism, particularly in the clash between the Islamic civilization and the West. The authors confront his hypotheses with ones derived from the strategic logic of international terrorism. They predict more terrorism against nationals from countries whose governments support the government of the terrorists’ home country. Like Huntington, they also predict exces…
Free-riding in alliances
We revisit the old and well-established theory of free-riding in military alliances. Existing empirical evidence infers free-riding from the larger military expenditures per gross domestic product (GDP) of countries of larger GDP. Yet, larger countries have broader military and geostrategic interests that result in larger defense burdens, thus creating an identification problem for existing tests of free-riding behavior. We therefore develop alte…
The Internal Value of External Options
Most of the literature has treated EU enlargement and the transition of Central and Eastern Europe, two of the most memorable events in recent history, as separate events. We argue that such separation is not warranted; it obfuscates an important fact, namely that the reform process in many Central and East European countries has taken a sui generis turn precisely because of the external EU option. We offer a formal model that explains how and wh…
Galton’s Problem and Contagion in International Terrorism along Civilizational Lines
If terror attacks from groups of one country are followed by similar attacks on the same target from groups of other similar countries, then this could be the consequence of contagion. However, just because one terror incident follows another does not necessarily imply that one is caused by the other or, in other words, that terror attacks are what is called spatially dependent. Rather, both incidents could have been triggered by the same underly…
The Level of Democracy during Interregnum Periods
The polity2 variable from the Polity IV project is the most popular measure of a country's political regime. This article contends that the coding rules employed to create a polity2 score during years of so-called interregnum and affected transitions produce a measure of democracy that lacks face validity. Using both single and multiple imputation methods, we construct and evaluate several variables that offer alternative measures to polity2 duri…
Discriminatory European Union Membership and the Redistribution of Enlargement Gains
Conflicts between European Union (EU) members about enlargement result from its redistributive effects. EU members are more likely to suffer from enlargement if they profit from EU transfers and if they are relatively close to applicant countries in which unemployment is significantly higher than in member countries. Phasing in membership rights serves to compensate the relative losers of enlargement to accomplish EU widening. Using data from all…
Democracy, Government Spending, and Economic Growth
Hegemonic Decline and International Leadership
Hegemons, Leaders and Followers
The article introduces the concept of hegemony to leadership theory, which has developed mainly as a critique of hegemonic stability theory. We argue that it makes sense to combine the two theories by introducing the concept of 'size' into neoliberal thinking about International Political Economy. We accept the neo-institutional hypothesis that a hegemon is not needed to provide public goods, and demonstrate with non-cooperative games how multipl…
Regulatory competition and international co-operation
Recent research has shown that regulatory competition does not necessarily lead to downward pressures on regulation, but may at times also push the level of regulation upwards. Extending David Vogel's 'California effect' argument, this article shows that such upward pressure may not only result directly from the dynamics of the competitive process but also from international co-operation. Evidence from two case studies on international capital ma…
Inter National Division of La Bor and Global Economic Processes;an Analysis of the International Trade in Automobiles
Many political discussions share a common understanding of a rapidly changing world. A global market economy is seen to pose new demands for national markets and is expected to increase the international competition concerning locational factors. Globalization is the keyword of this debate. It describes an economic process that results from changes in the investment, production and distribution decisions made by individual firms and households. U…
The impact of actor heterogeneity on the provision of international public goods
The article formally analyses the conditions under which actor heterogeneity may have positive effects on the likelihood that international public goods will be provided, and when a hegemon chooses to act benevolently versus coercively toward the other actors. Within the theory of international cooperation the game‐theoretic model crucially rests on the key concepts of hegemonic stability theory. It illustrates with Nash equilibria the conditions…
Bringing Putnam to the European Regions
One of the most influential contributions to the study of political culture of the 1990s was Robert D. Putnam’s book on the positive impact that interpersonal trust supposedly has on economic welfare and the effectiveness of political institutions in Italy. Making Democracy Work showed in bivariate correlations that progress depends largely on the social capital manifest in the Italian regions. We evaluate this hypothesis in a wider sample of reg…
Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie
Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtIich geschützt.
Export specialization and economic growth
Traditional economic wisdom claims that - while global economic integration is beneficial for economic performance - a country's trade specialization pattern has no impact on its economic performance. In this paper, we seek to cast doubt on this aspect of mainstream economics using a very traditional approach. We introduce a simple endogenous growth model that shows how governments can stimulate economic growth by implementing policies that succe…
Regimetyp und Wirtschaftswachstum; ein Kommentar (nicht nur) zu Herbert Obinger
Dieser Beitrag setzt sich kritisch mit der unter anderem von Herbert Obinger formulierten Hypothese auseinander, derzufolge zwischen dem Regimetyp und dem langfristigen Wirtschaftswachstum kein Zusammenhang besteht. Entgegen dieser These zeigen wir einen systematischen, wenngleich nicht‐linearen Zusammenhang auf. Darüber hinaus unterstreichen wir zwar Obingers Ergebnis, die institutionelle Qualität eines Staates sei entscheidend für sein langfris…
Containing Contagious Financial Crises
The demand-side politics of EU enlargement
Most theoretical arguments about enlargement have sought to elucidate why the EU may have an interest in accepting CEECs. While these 'supply-side' arguments are essential building blocks of a comprehensive account of enlargement, they need to be complemented by a theory that seeks to understand the politics and economics of enlargement from a demand-side perspective. We show in a formal model how a transition country's demand for EU membership r…
Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie
Politische Integration.
Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie. Folge 2/2002.
Democracy, Government Spending, and Economic Growth
Two sides of economic openness
This article presents new measures of foreign economic openness in the transition countries that allow us to distinguish between non-tariff barriers to trade and capital controls. We argue that this distinction is important for the analysis of foreign economic relations in the postcommunist world. While most states lowered barriers to trade since 1993, they increased the number of capital controls, which had been low at the beginning of the trans…
Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie
Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie
The Estimation of Time-Invariant Variables in Panel Analyses with Unit Fixed Effects
Government Spending and Taxation in Democracies and Autocracies
Stammwähler und die opportunistische Wahl parteipolitischer Programme
This article explains political radicalism by the number of voters who are biased towards a party. With little voters biased in favor of a party, this party has to rely more heavily on its programmatic distance to other parties. Because large parties – i.e.: parties with a high number of biased voters – gain votes when they move to the center of the political spectrum, parties with a lower number of voters that are biased in their favor are force…
Publish or perish? Publications and citations of Italian political scientists in international political science journals, 1990-2002
In this article we present data on the publications of Italian political scientists in international journals. We first introduce the reader to the specific context of Italian political science and illustrate the pattern of problematic institutionalization of this discipline in Italy. We then work on our broad set of eighty-nine journals indexed in the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) social science citation index, examined over the per…
The Internal Value of External Options
Most of the literature has treated EU enlargement and the transition of Central and Eastern Europe, two of the most memorable events in recent history, as separate events. We argue that such separation is not warranted; it obfuscates an important fact, namely that the reform process in many Central and East European countries has taken a sui generis turn precisely because of the external EU option. We offer a formal model that explains how and wh…
Number of Parties, Endogenous Partisan Preferences, and Electoral Turnout Rates
This article analyzes the impact of the number of parties on turnout rates within an endogenous partisan preference framework. Our results show that the turnout increases in the number of parties under various levels of individual propensity to abstain. We find strong interactions effects between both motives for abstention—alienation and indifference—and the abstention propensity. The results are based on an agent-based computer simulation of mu…
Panel data analysis in comparative politics
Re‐analyzing a study of Garrett and Mitchell (‘Globalization, government spending and taxation in the OECD’, European Journal of Political Research 39(2) (2001): 145–177), this article addresses four potential sources of problems in panel data analyses with a lagged dependent variable and period and unit dummies (the de facto Beck‐Katz standard). These are: absorption of cross‐sectional variance by unit dummies, absorption of time‐series variance…
Economics (53 works) · Political science (53 works) · Law (36 works) · Politics (32 works) · Law (31 works) · Development economics (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Econometrics (15 works) · Mathematics (14 works) · Political economy (14 works)