Watson CenterUR

Faculty

  • Hein Goemans (Ph.D. Chicago, 1995)

    Associate Professor of Political Science

    Director, Peter D. Watson Center for Conflict and Cooperation

    Research: International relations, conflict. Current research explores when and why people become attached to specific pieces of territory which together constitute a “homeland” and the consequences of these attachments. His book War and Punishment was published by Princeton University Press (2000); other publications have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Conflict Resolution and the British Journal of Political Science. His teaching focuses on international relations, with an emphasis on conflict and international relations history. This work has been discussed in non-academic settings on network TV, public radio and in posts on blogs such as The Washington Post's Monkey Cage.

  • Randall W. Stone (Ph.D. Harvard, 1993)

    Professor of Political Science

    Research: Current research focuses on international finance and international organizations. Books include "Controlling Institutions: International Organizations and the Global Economy" (Cambridge, 2011); "Lending Credibility: The International Monetary Fund and the Post-Communist Transition" (Princeton, 2002); and "Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade" (Princeton, 1996). Articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Review of International Organizations, and Global Environmental Politics.

  • Curtis S. Signorino (Ph.D. Harvard, 1998)

    Associate Professor of Political Science

    Research: Statistical Methods, International Conflict, Formal Theory. Professor Signorino develops statistical methods, primarily with application to international conflict. His research includes structural estimation of games, machine learning techniques, event history models, and issues concerning nonrandom sample selection. Professor Signorino's articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, International Interactions, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Political Analysis.

  • Mark Fey (Ph.D. Caltech, 1995)

    Professor of Political Science

    Research: Positive political theory, game theory, social choice theory. Current research focuses on voting and elections, comparative electoral systems, and international conflict. Publications include "Mutual Optimism and War," American Journal of Political Science (forthcoming); "The Swing Voter's Curse with Adversarial Preferences," Journal of Economic Theory (2007); "The Common Priors Assumption: A Comment on Bargaining and the Nature of War," Journal of Conflict Resolution (2006); "Repeated Downsian Electoral Competition," International Journal of Game Theory (2006); "Electoral Competition with Policy-Motivated Candidates," (with John Duggan), Games and Economic Behavior (2005); "May's Theorem with an Infinite Population," Social Choice and Welfare, (2004); "A Note on the Condorcet Jury Theorem with Supermajority Rules," Social Choice and Welfare, (2003); "The Swing Voter's Curse: Comment," American Economic Review (2002); and "Stability and Coordination in Duverger's Law: A Formal Model of Pre-Election Polls and Strategic Voting," American Political Science Review (1997). Teaches courses in the field of positive theory.

  • Bethany Lacina (Ph.D. Stanford, 2011)

    Associate Professor of Political Science

    Research: Examines how governments manage threats to internal security by studying the history of separatist and language conflicts in India; International relations, comparative politics, conflict, and Indian politics; Migration and civil violence and cross-national correlates of civil war; Co-author of a dataset on battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts, housed at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo.

  • Kevin A. Clarke (Ph.D. Michigan, 2001)

    Associate Professor of Political Science

    Research: Political methodology, international relations, conflict processes, and philosophy of science. Current research develops classical, nonparametric, and Bayesian methods for discriminating between rival statistical models. Author of " Nonparametric Model Discrimination in International Relations," Journal of Conflict Resolution (2003), " Testing Nonnested Models of International Relations: Reevaluating Realism," American Journal of Political Science (2001) and " The Reverend and the Ravens," Political Analysis (2002). Teaches courses in political methodology and international relations.

  • Scott Abramson (Ph.D. Princeton, 2015)

    Assistant Professor of Political Science

    Research:

  • Alexander Lee (Ph.D. Stanford, 2013)

    Assistant Professor of Political Science

    Research: Historical factors governing the success or failure of political institutions, particularly in South Asia and other areas of the developing world; Politics of identity and distribution, and the origins of sovereignty; Uses quantitative methods, historical sources, and intensive fieldwork in rural India; Published in World Politics, the Journal of Politics, and Politics & Society and the Quarterly Journal of Political Science.

  • Jack Paine (Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 2015)

    Assistant Professor of Political Science

    Research: Using conflict bargaining models to explain why higher national-level oil wealth decreases prospects for center-seeking civil wars but also why oil-rich regions fight separatist civil wars relatively frequently; Examination of historical causes of wars and democracy; Topics include long-term legacies of pre-colonial statehood, domestic and international consequences of colonial European settlement, and British colonialism; Game theoretic models of authoritarian survival and state-building strategies, and qualitative methods; Published or is forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, and Journal of Theoretical Politics.