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Democratic diffusion

Democracy in the world increases - more and more countries are democratic - and clusters - countries bordering on other democracies have a higher chance of being a democracy, and of making a transition to democracy. Why? That is exactly what my dissertation is about.

Latest working paper: An agent-based model of democratic diffusion.

My dissertation can be found here.

An earlier conference paper studying the presence of democratic diffusion while controlling for the geographic clustering of economic development can be found here: Democratic and economic diffusion.

Irish electoral behaviour and the Treaty of Lisbon

As part of a consultancy project for the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, I participated in producing a report on explaining the Irish “No” in the referendum of June 2008 on the European Treaty of Lisbon:

Richard Sinnott, Johan A. Elkink, Kevin O’Rourke, James McBride, Attitudes and behaviour in the referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon, report prepared for the Department of Foreign Affairs, 6 March 2009.

Russian politics

An earlier step in my research on democratic diffusion focused on Russia’s subnational regions. Studying the vote for the liberal-democratic parties Yabloko and Soyuz Pravikh Sil in the 1999 Duma elections as a proxy for pro-democratic attitudes in Russia’s 89 regions, an estimate is made of the extent to which democratic attitudes cluster geographically at a subnational level.

My latest, but dated working paper: Differences in democratic sentiment in Russia’s regions explained.

General research interests

Quantitative methods in political science
Spatial econometrics (see links page)
Agent-based modeling
Russian politics
European politics
Democratization
Comparative political institutions
Political philosophy, in particular studies on citizenship