Research Portfolio — Extreme Weather and Political Violence*
*Select projects; see CV for complete list.
“Disorganized Political Violence: A Demonstration Case of Temperature and Insurgency.” International Organization (Accepted). (w/ Bollfrass, A.)
How likely is an act of battlefield violence to result from organizational strategy or a combatant’s personal motives? To measure the relative contribution of each, our research design leverages the predictable effect of ambient temperature on human aggression and the variation in organizational control required for launching insurgent attacks during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. We test whether temperature and violence are linked for attacks that can be initiated by individual combatants, but not for those requiring organizational coordination. To distinguish alternative explanations about the effect of temperature on the behavior of attack targets, we test situations in which these are fixed or stationary. We find that the more discretion combatants have over the initiation of violence, the more battlefield outcomes are shaped by their individual, embodied motivations and that this autonomy robustly influences conflict intensity. To confirm the embodied motivation mechanism, we show that ambient temperature affected the willingness of military-age Iraqi men to endorse violence against international forces. The results caution against attributing strategic motivations to observed acts of violence, especially when individual combatants have autonomy over the initiation and intensity of attacks. They also encourage future attention to the interaction of strategic- and individual-level motivations in conflict settings.
“The Effects of Temperature on Political Violence: Global Evidence at the Subnational Level.” PLoS One 10.5 (2015): e0123505. (w/ Bollfrass, A.)
A number of studies have demonstrated an empirical relationship between higher ambient temperatures and substate violence, which have been extrapolated to make predictions about the security implications of climate change. This literature rests on the untested assumption that the mechanism behind the temperature-conflict link is that disruption of agricultural production provokes local violence. Using a subnational-level dataset, this paper demonstrates that the relationship: (1) obtains globally, (2) exists at the substate level — provinces that experience positive temperature deviations see increased conflict; and (3) occurs even in regions without significant agricultural production. Diminished local farm output resulting from elevated temperatures is unlikely to account for the entire increase in substate violence. The findings encourage future research to identify additional mechanisms, including the possibility that a substantial portion of the variation is brought about by the well-documented direct effects of temperature on individuals' propensity for violence or through macroeconomic mechanisms such as food price shocks.
“Media Underreporting on Natural Disasters and Implications for Data.”
Floods, landslides, and mudslides are among the most common natural disasters worldwide, and they impose significant costs on society. These events are expected to intensify as the earth's climate continues to change--- though impacts are expected vary across the world's regions. Accordingly, predicting such events and understanding their causes, consequences, and changing patterns is the focus of significant study. Critically, major datasets on flooding and land/mudslides are based partly or wholly on news media reports. Existing social science research finds significant and systematic underreporting within news report based datasets on political violence and social unrest. In this article, I provide evidence of both substantial overall and systematic missingness within news report-based natural disaster data, which show significant selection on natural disaster-level human cost. Importantly, however, this results in underreporting on smaller scale events, which in aggregate, account for significantly greater cost. Finally, I reflect on possible supplementary collection efforts that data curators might pursue to improve natural disaster data quality.
Climate Change, Political Violence, and Measurement. (w/ Bollfrass, A., Felter, J., Lopez, D., Rodarte, E., $\&$ Saude, J.) [IN PROGRESS]
A large and growing body of research explores the effects of a changing global climate on political violence. Yet, major cross-national political violence data sets are constructed largely from news reports. We consider a fundamental issue of endogeneity: whether the news media’s reporting patterns on conflict themselves systematically vary with weather conditions and natural disasters. Using detailed records released by various government security forces as a baseline, we estimate the influence of severe weather and natural disasters on reporting patterns by the news media.