David B Carter
Biographic Data
| ID | 4371359 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David B Carter |
| GIVEN NAMES | David B |
| FAMILY NAME | Carter |
| SIGNATURE | CARTER D B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Washington University in St. Louis |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2139-5705 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1616 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Trust, trust repair, and public health: A scoping review
Objective This study investigates the scope of evidence on trust, trust repair, and public health. Methods We identified quantitative studies that evaluated the relationship between trust or trust repair and public health from January 1990 to May 2023. Results were stratified evaluating trust as an exposure or outcome and reporting on trust repair. Data are reported on spatiotemporal trends in publications, level of trust (institutional trust, ge…
Population Displacement and State Building: The Legacies of Pashtun Resettlement in Afghanistan
Population displacement is a prominent state-building strategy. Using either force or positive inducements, states sponsor the resettlement of racial, ethnic, or linguistic groups to consolidate territorial control. We evaluate the long-run consequences of large-scale displacement by analyzing a historical episode in Afghanistan: the relocation of Pashtun communities during the rule of Emir Abd al-Rahman. Using historical records, we reconstruct …
Border Barriers and Illicit Trade Flows
s The number of fortified borders around the world has risen precipitously. This surge in walls is an important part of the larger globalization “backlash,” as countries react to the unwanted consequences of economic openness and globalization, with a rise in illicit trade and smuggling being a prominent example. Despite the prominence of the idea that walls are built to combat illicit flows, no research systematically explores how walls generall…
The Geography of Separatist Violence
The literature on separatist groups has paid relatively little attention to groups’ exact territorial claims and their influence on strategies. We explain the geographic distribution of separatist violence using new geospatial data on the location and extent of groups’ territorial claims. We argue that variation in where separatists attack stems from variation in how groups allocate effort across two main objectives: control in the claimed region…
The Varieties of Coups D’état: Introducing the Colpus Dataset
Interest in authoritarian politics and democratic breakdown has fueled a revival in scholarship on coups d'état. However, this research is held back by the fact that no global coup dataset captures theoretically salient information on the identity of coup-makers, their goals, and the relationship between the coup leaders and the ruling regime. We introduce the Colpus dataset, new global data on coup types and characteristics in the post–World War…
Systemic Instability and the Emergence of Border Disputes
Although evidence shows that territorial disputes fundamentally shape relations among states, we know surprisingly little about when territorial claims are made. We argue that revisionist states have incentives to make territorial claims when the great powers that manage the system are in crisis. We identify five main sources of systemic instability and develop measures of each of them, demonstrating that the majority of territorial claims in Eur…
Places to Hide: Terrain, Ethnicity, and Civil Conflict
Terrain is central to understanding why some countries experience contentious ethnic divisions and civil war. While existing research specifies a direct effect of rugged terrain on civil war (i.e., it impedes state efforts to counter rebellion), we argue that terrain has an overlooked indirect effect on civil war via its historical influence on the distribution and political status of ethnic groups. We argue that access to variable rugged terrain…
International Law, Territorial Disputes, and Foreign Direct Investment
Although contentious interstate disputes are widely known to depress foreign direct investment (FDI), we identify and explain variation in investor responses even to territorial disputes, known to be slow to resolve and prone to militarization. Forward-looking and profit-seeking investors have incentives to increase FDI when the characteristics of a dispute point toward peace. These incentives drive them to increase investment even prior to an ac…
International Trade and Coordination: Tracing Border Effects
This article examines how the institutional design of borders affects international trade. The authors explore variation in the effects of borders by comparing new international borders that follow precedent and thus have a prior institutional history with new international borders that lack such an institutional history. The former minimally disrupt—or restore—previous economic networks, while the latter fundamentally disrupt existing economic n…
Why Do States Build Walls? Political Economy, Security, and Border Stability
Borders constitute the international system of states. Accordingly, states will, from time to time, take assertive measures to secure the border, with among the most aggressive strategies being the construction of physical barriers, which we refer to as “border walls.” Using original data on man-made border wall construction from 1800 to 2014, we theorize and find that in many cases, wall construction is about economic security. Significant econo…
The Historical Origins of Territorial Disputes
Given the abundance of evidence that disputed territory matters, we know remarkably little about the origins of territorial claims. We argue that the presence of competing historical border precedents is central to the emergence of territorial claims. We outline why precedents provide opportunity to make claims and provide two possible explanations for why leaders have incentive to claim along precedents. One possibility is consistent with the co…
Terrorism and the Fate of Dictators
The authors study the influence of domestic political dissent and violence on incumbent dictators and their regimes. They argue that elite with an interest in preserving the regime hold dictators accountable when there is a significant increase in terrorism. To pinpoint the accountability of dictators to elite who are strongly invested in the current regime, the authors make a novel theoretical distinction between reshuffling coups that change th…
The Compellence Dilemma: International Disputes with Violent Groups
This article introduces the idea of a compellence dilemma. This dilemma arises when the domestic policies of adversaries—such as hosting violent groups—threaten states' security. Such states often consider coercive instruments to compel their adversary to change those policies. The problem? The prospect of costly punishment makes cooperation more attractive for the adversary. However, if they fail to coerce policy change, harsh punishments can re…
Democracy and Multilateralism: The Case of Vote Buying in the UN General Assembly
Democracies are more supportive of US positions on important votes in the UN General Assembly than of nondemocracies. Is this because democracies share common perspectives, or does this pattern reflect coercion? Since 1985, US law has stipulated that the US State Department identify important votes and that aid disbursements reflect voting decisions. To unravel these alternative explanations, we introduce a strategic statistical model that allows…
Fair-Weather Allies? Terrorism and the Allocation of US Foreign Aid
While it is commonly assumed that the United States uses foreign aid as an instrument to combat global terrorism, it is unclear whether it views terrorist threats to other countries, particularly its allies, with urgency. We show that the relationship between transnational terrorism and foreign aid flows is strongly conditional on whether terrorist activity based in a potential recipient directly threatens the United States. Using data on terrori…
Electoral Institutions and the Emergence of Terrorist Groups
A wide range of studies find that democracies experience more terrorism than non-democracies. However, surprisingly little terrorism research takes into account the variation among democracies in terms of their electoral institutions. Furthermore, despite much discussion of the differences in terrorist groups’ goals in the literature, little quantitative work distinguishes among groups with different goals, and none explores whether and how the i…
Terrorism In Dictatorships
A key finding in the terrorism literature is that dictatorships experience less terrorism than democracies. However, we have few explanations for why some dictatorships experience substantial threats from terrorism while others do not. A growing body of work on authoritarian politics focuses on political institutions in these regimes to explain a broad range of political outcomes. Building on this literature, we argue that opposition political pa…
A Blessing or a Curse? State Support for Terrorist Groups
Little existing work has systematically examined the factors that help terrorist groups survive or contribute to their failure. State support for terrorist groups is commonly thought to be a factor that helps groups to survive. I demonstrate with newly collected data that state sponsorship is not always helpful to terrorist groups. The resources provided by sponsors increase a group's ability to maintain itself internally. However, when a group h…
The Making of the Territorial Order: New Borders and the Emergence of Interstate Conflict
We argue that new international borders are rarely new. We propose that when states choose new borders they use previous administrative frontiers to solve a difficult short-term bargaining problem and a long-term coordination problem. With a unique new set of data collected specifically for this project, we systematically examine the new international borders of the twentieth century resulting from secession, partition, and the use of force. New …
Reply to “Time is Not A Theoretical Variable
We thank Neal Beck for his comments. In general, there is little difference in our theoretical and practical positions. We all agree that in some applications, time dummies can be problematic; controlling for temporal dependence is important for less-biased estimation of the coefficients on our substantive regressors; a smoothed function of time (whether via a cubic polynomial or spline) is a useful way to model temporal dependence in grouped bin…
Back to the Future: Modeling Time Dependence in Binary Data
Since Beck, Katz, and Tucker (1998), the standard method for modeling time dependence in binary data has been to incorporate time dummies or splined time in logistic regressions. Although we agree with the need for modeling time dependence, we demonstrate that time dummies can induce estimation problems due to separation. Splines do not suffer from these problems. However, the complexity of splines has led substantive researchers (1) to use knot …
The Strategy of Territorial Conflict
Many empirical studies have found that disputes over territory are central to the outbreak and intensity of the majority of interstate military conflict. However, the existing literature lacks an explicit theoretical link between the role territory plays in disputes and the outbreak of violence as well as an exploration of how the control of territory is related to conventional military capabilities. This article demonstrates that the targets of …
Back to the Future: Modeling Time Dependence in Binary Data
Since Beck, Katz, and Tucker (1998), the standard method for modeling time dependence in binary data has been to incorporate time dummies or splined time in logistic regressions. Although we agree with the need for modeling time dependence, we demonstrate that time dummies can induce estimation problems due to separation. Splines do not suffer from these problems. However, the complexity of splines has led substantive researchers (1) to use knot …
Democracy and Multilateralism: The Case of Vote Buying in the UN General Assembly
Democracies are more supportive of US positions on important votes in the UN General Assembly than of nondemocracies. Is this because democracies share common perspectives, or does this pattern reflect coercion? Since 1985, US law has stipulated that the US State Department identify important votes and that aid disbursements reflect voting decisions. To unravel these alternative explanations, we introduce a strategic statistical model that allows…
The Making of the Territorial Order: New Borders and the Emergence of Interstate Conflict
We argue that new international borders are rarely new. We propose that when states choose new borders they use previous administrative frontiers to solve a difficult short-term bargaining problem and a long-term coordination problem. With a unique new set of data collected specifically for this project, we systematically examine the new international borders of the twentieth century resulting from secession, partition, and the use of force. New …
The Strategy of Territorial Conflict
Many empirical studies have found that disputes over territory are central to the outbreak and intensity of the majority of interstate military conflict. However, the existing literature lacks an explicit theoretical link between the role territory plays in disputes and the outbreak of violence as well as an exploration of how the control of territory is related to conventional military capabilities. This article demonstrates that the targets of …
A Blessing or a Curse? State Support for Terrorist Groups
Little existing work has systematically examined the factors that help terrorist groups survive or contribute to their failure. State support for terrorist groups is commonly thought to be a factor that helps groups to survive. I demonstrate with newly collected data that state sponsorship is not always helpful to terrorist groups. The resources provided by sponsors increase a group's ability to maintain itself internally. However, when a group h…
Why Do States Build Walls? Political Economy, Security, and Border Stability
Borders constitute the international system of states. Accordingly, states will, from time to time, take assertive measures to secure the border, with among the most aggressive strategies being the construction of physical barriers, which we refer to as “border walls.” Using original data on man-made border wall construction from 1800 to 2014, we theorize and find that in many cases, wall construction is about economic security. Significant econo…
Terrorism and the Fate of Dictators
The authors study the influence of domestic political dissent and violence on incumbent dictators and their regimes. They argue that elite with an interest in preserving the regime hold dictators accountable when there is a significant increase in terrorism. To pinpoint the accountability of dictators to elite who are strongly invested in the current regime, the authors make a novel theoretical distinction between reshuffling coups that change th…
Terrorism In Dictatorships
A key finding in the terrorism literature is that dictatorships experience less terrorism than democracies. However, we have few explanations for why some dictatorships experience substantial threats from terrorism while others do not. A growing body of work on authoritarian politics focuses on political institutions in these regimes to explain a broad range of political outcomes. Building on this literature, we argue that opposition political pa…
The Historical Origins of Territorial Disputes
Given the abundance of evidence that disputed territory matters, we know remarkably little about the origins of territorial claims. We argue that the presence of competing historical border precedents is central to the emergence of territorial claims. We outline why precedents provide opportunity to make claims and provide two possible explanations for why leaders have incentive to claim along precedents. One possibility is consistent with the co…
Fair-Weather Allies? Terrorism and the Allocation of US Foreign Aid
While it is commonly assumed that the United States uses foreign aid as an instrument to combat global terrorism, it is unclear whether it views terrorist threats to other countries, particularly its allies, with urgency. We show that the relationship between transnational terrorism and foreign aid flows is strongly conditional on whether terrorist activity based in a potential recipient directly threatens the United States. Using data on terrori…
The Varieties of Coups D’état: Introducing the Colpus Dataset
Interest in authoritarian politics and democratic breakdown has fueled a revival in scholarship on coups d'état. However, this research is held back by the fact that no global coup dataset captures theoretically salient information on the identity of coup-makers, their goals, and the relationship between the coup leaders and the ruling regime. We introduce the Colpus dataset, new global data on coup types and characteristics in the post–World War…
Electoral Institutions and the Emergence of Terrorist Groups
A wide range of studies find that democracies experience more terrorism than non-democracies. However, surprisingly little terrorism research takes into account the variation among democracies in terms of their electoral institutions. Furthermore, despite much discussion of the differences in terrorist groups’ goals in the literature, little quantitative work distinguishes among groups with different goals, and none explores whether and how the i…
The Compellence Dilemma: International Disputes with Violent Groups
This article introduces the idea of a compellence dilemma. This dilemma arises when the domestic policies of adversaries—such as hosting violent groups—threaten states' security. Such states often consider coercive instruments to compel their adversary to change those policies. The problem? The prospect of costly punishment makes cooperation more attractive for the adversary. However, if they fail to coerce policy change, harsh punishments can re…
Places to Hide: Terrain, Ethnicity, and Civil Conflict
Terrain is central to understanding why some countries experience contentious ethnic divisions and civil war. While existing research specifies a direct effect of rugged terrain on civil war (i.e., it impedes state efforts to counter rebellion), we argue that terrain has an overlooked indirect effect on civil war via its historical influence on the distribution and political status of ethnic groups. We argue that access to variable rugged terrain…
International Law, Territorial Disputes, and Foreign Direct Investment
Although contentious interstate disputes are widely known to depress foreign direct investment (FDI), we identify and explain variation in investor responses even to territorial disputes, known to be slow to resolve and prone to militarization. Forward-looking and profit-seeking investors have incentives to increase FDI when the characteristics of a dispute point toward peace. These incentives drive them to increase investment even prior to an ac…
Systemic Instability and the Emergence of Border Disputes
Although evidence shows that territorial disputes fundamentally shape relations among states, we know surprisingly little about when territorial claims are made. We argue that revisionist states have incentives to make territorial claims when the great powers that manage the system are in crisis. We identify five main sources of systemic instability and develop measures of each of them, demonstrating that the majority of territorial claims in Eur…
International Trade and Coordination: Tracing Border Effects
This article examines how the institutional design of borders affects international trade. The authors explore variation in the effects of borders by comparing new international borders that follow precedent and thus have a prior institutional history with new international borders that lack such an institutional history. The former minimally disrupt—or restore—previous economic networks, while the latter fundamentally disrupt existing economic n…
The Geography of Separatist Violence
The literature on separatist groups has paid relatively little attention to groups’ exact territorial claims and their influence on strategies. We explain the geographic distribution of separatist violence using new geospatial data on the location and extent of groups’ territorial claims. We argue that variation in where separatists attack stems from variation in how groups allocate effort across two main objectives: control in the claimed region…
Reply to “Time is Not A Theoretical Variable
We thank Neal Beck for his comments. In general, there is little difference in our theoretical and practical positions. We all agree that in some applications, time dummies can be problematic; controlling for temporal dependence is important for less-biased estimation of the coefficients on our substantive regressors; a smoothed function of time (whether via a cubic polynomial or spline) is a useful way to model temporal dependence in grouped bin…
Reply to “Time is Not A Theoretical Variable
We thank Neal Beck for his comments. In general, there is little difference in our theoretical and practical positions. We all agree that in some applications, time dummies can be problematic; controlling for temporal dependence is important for less-biased estimation of the coefficients on our substantive regressors; a smoothed function of time (whether via a cubic polynomial or spline) is a useful way to model temporal dependence in grouped bin…
Back to the Future: Modeling Time Dependence in Binary Data
Since Beck, Katz, and Tucker (1998), the standard method for modeling time dependence in binary data has been to incorporate time dummies or splined time in logistic regressions. Although we agree with the need for modeling time dependence, we demonstrate that time dummies can induce estimation problems due to separation. Splines do not suffer from these problems. However, the complexity of splines has led substantive researchers (1) to use knot …
The Strategy of Territorial Conflict
Many empirical studies have found that disputes over territory are central to the outbreak and intensity of the majority of interstate military conflict. However, the existing literature lacks an explicit theoretical link between the role territory plays in disputes and the outbreak of violence as well as an exploration of how the control of territory is related to conventional military capabilities. This article demonstrates that the targets of …
The Making of the Territorial Order: New Borders and the Emergence of Interstate Conflict
We argue that new international borders are rarely new. We propose that when states choose new borders they use previous administrative frontiers to solve a difficult short-term bargaining problem and a long-term coordination problem. With a unique new set of data collected specifically for this project, we systematically examine the new international borders of the twentieth century resulting from secession, partition, and the use of force. New …
Terrorism In Dictatorships
A key finding in the terrorism literature is that dictatorships experience less terrorism than democracies. However, we have few explanations for why some dictatorships experience substantial threats from terrorism while others do not. A growing body of work on authoritarian politics focuses on political institutions in these regimes to explain a broad range of political outcomes. Building on this literature, we argue that opposition political pa…
A Blessing or a Curse? State Support for Terrorist Groups
Little existing work has systematically examined the factors that help terrorist groups survive or contribute to their failure. State support for terrorist groups is commonly thought to be a factor that helps groups to survive. I demonstrate with newly collected data that state sponsorship is not always helpful to terrorist groups. The resources provided by sponsors increase a group's ability to maintain itself internally. However, when a group h…
Fair-Weather Allies? Terrorism and the Allocation of US Foreign Aid
While it is commonly assumed that the United States uses foreign aid as an instrument to combat global terrorism, it is unclear whether it views terrorist threats to other countries, particularly its allies, with urgency. We show that the relationship between transnational terrorism and foreign aid flows is strongly conditional on whether terrorist activity based in a potential recipient directly threatens the United States. Using data on terrori…
Electoral Institutions and the Emergence of Terrorist Groups
A wide range of studies find that democracies experience more terrorism than non-democracies. However, surprisingly little terrorism research takes into account the variation among democracies in terms of their electoral institutions. Furthermore, despite much discussion of the differences in terrorist groups’ goals in the literature, little quantitative work distinguishes among groups with different goals, and none explores whether and how the i…
Terrorism and the Fate of Dictators
The authors study the influence of domestic political dissent and violence on incumbent dictators and their regimes. They argue that elite with an interest in preserving the regime hold dictators accountable when there is a significant increase in terrorism. To pinpoint the accountability of dictators to elite who are strongly invested in the current regime, the authors make a novel theoretical distinction between reshuffling coups that change th…
The Compellence Dilemma: International Disputes with Violent Groups
This article introduces the idea of a compellence dilemma. This dilemma arises when the domestic policies of adversaries—such as hosting violent groups—threaten states' security. Such states often consider coercive instruments to compel their adversary to change those policies. The problem? The prospect of costly punishment makes cooperation more attractive for the adversary. However, if they fail to coerce policy change, harsh punishments can re…
Democracy and Multilateralism: The Case of Vote Buying in the UN General Assembly
Democracies are more supportive of US positions on important votes in the UN General Assembly than of nondemocracies. Is this because democracies share common perspectives, or does this pattern reflect coercion? Since 1985, US law has stipulated that the US State Department identify important votes and that aid disbursements reflect voting decisions. To unravel these alternative explanations, we introduce a strategic statistical model that allows…
The Historical Origins of Territorial Disputes
Given the abundance of evidence that disputed territory matters, we know remarkably little about the origins of territorial claims. We argue that the presence of competing historical border precedents is central to the emergence of territorial claims. We outline why precedents provide opportunity to make claims and provide two possible explanations for why leaders have incentive to claim along precedents. One possibility is consistent with the co…
Why Do States Build Walls? Political Economy, Security, and Border Stability
Borders constitute the international system of states. Accordingly, states will, from time to time, take assertive measures to secure the border, with among the most aggressive strategies being the construction of physical barriers, which we refer to as “border walls.” Using original data on man-made border wall construction from 1800 to 2014, we theorize and find that in many cases, wall construction is about economic security. Significant econo…
International Trade and Coordination: Tracing Border Effects
This article examines how the institutional design of borders affects international trade. The authors explore variation in the effects of borders by comparing new international borders that follow precedent and thus have a prior institutional history with new international borders that lack such an institutional history. The former minimally disrupt—or restore—previous economic networks, while the latter fundamentally disrupt existing economic n…
Places to Hide: Terrain, Ethnicity, and Civil Conflict
Terrain is central to understanding why some countries experience contentious ethnic divisions and civil war. While existing research specifies a direct effect of rugged terrain on civil war (i.e., it impedes state efforts to counter rebellion), we argue that terrain has an overlooked indirect effect on civil war via its historical influence on the distribution and political status of ethnic groups. We argue that access to variable rugged terrain…
International Law, Territorial Disputes, and Foreign Direct Investment
Although contentious interstate disputes are widely known to depress foreign direct investment (FDI), we identify and explain variation in investor responses even to territorial disputes, known to be slow to resolve and prone to militarization. Forward-looking and profit-seeking investors have incentives to increase FDI when the characteristics of a dispute point toward peace. These incentives drive them to increase investment even prior to an ac…
The Varieties of Coups D’état: Introducing the Colpus Dataset
Interest in authoritarian politics and democratic breakdown has fueled a revival in scholarship on coups d'état. However, this research is held back by the fact that no global coup dataset captures theoretically salient information on the identity of coup-makers, their goals, and the relationship between the coup leaders and the ruling regime. We introduce the Colpus dataset, new global data on coup types and characteristics in the post–World War…
Systemic Instability and the Emergence of Border Disputes
Although evidence shows that territorial disputes fundamentally shape relations among states, we know surprisingly little about when territorial claims are made. We argue that revisionist states have incentives to make territorial claims when the great powers that manage the system are in crisis. We identify five main sources of systemic instability and develop measures of each of them, demonstrating that the majority of territorial claims in Eur…
The Geography of Separatist Violence
The literature on separatist groups has paid relatively little attention to groups’ exact territorial claims and their influence on strategies. We explain the geographic distribution of separatist violence using new geospatial data on the location and extent of groups’ territorial claims. We argue that variation in where separatists attack stems from variation in how groups allocate effort across two main objectives: control in the claimed region…
Border Barriers and Illicit Trade Flows
s The number of fortified borders around the world has risen precipitously. This surge in walls is an important part of the larger globalization “backlash,” as countries react to the unwanted consequences of economic openness and globalization, with a rise in illicit trade and smuggling being a prominent example. Despite the prominence of the idea that walls are built to combat illicit flows, no research systematically explores how walls generall…
Trust, trust repair, and public health: A scoping review
Objective This study investigates the scope of evidence on trust, trust repair, and public health. Methods We identified quantitative studies that evaluated the relationship between trust or trust repair and public health from January 1990 to May 2023. Results were stratified evaluating trust as an exposure or outcome and reporting on trust repair. Data are reported on spatiotemporal trends in publications, level of trust (institutional trust, ge…
Population Displacement and State Building: The Legacies of Pashtun Resettlement in Afghanistan
Population displacement is a prominent state-building strategy. Using either force or positive inducements, states sponsor the resettlement of racial, ethnic, or linguistic groups to consolidate territorial control. We evaluate the long-run consequences of large-scale displacement by analyzing a historical episode in Afghanistan: the relocation of Pashtun communities during the rule of Emir Abd al-Rahman. Using historical records, we reconstruct …
Political science (17 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Business (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works)