On the basis of a broad sample of quantitative studies in comparative politics, published in leading academic journals between 1989 and 2007, this paper offers an empirical radiography of data usage in comparative empirical research. It provides systematic information about…

Over the past two decades, we have seen an impressive expansion of quantitative work in comparative politics. The expanding edifice of quantitative cross-national political research, however, rests upon incomplete as well as insecure foundations of cross-national data. Despite the incessant…

Using two-wave panel data from the National Survey of Political Culture (ENCUP, in Spanish), I explore if declining satisfaction with democracy in Mexico between 2001 and 2003 owes more to political or economic evaluations. I model the data using a…

Electoral authoritarian regimes represent the modal type of political regimes in the developing world. To control electoral outcomes, such regimes may deploy a broad variety of repressive and manipulative measures. Despite their empirical as well as normative relevance, we possess…

This article presents a Monte Carlo EM algorithm to estimate multivariate endogenous switching regression models with censored and/or discrete responses and heteroscedastic errors. Advantages of the algorithm include: (1) it does not require numerical integration; (2) it reduces the estimation…

When President Felipe Calderón took office he declared a war on drug lords, thus initiating a war of attrition which has claimed more than 40,000 lives in the last 5 years. In this paper I document how this escalation of…

Standard methodological advice in the social sciences tells us to base our measurement decisions on observations, not judgments. It presupposes that we divide the process of measurement into two phases. In a first judgmental stage, we reach all the judgments…

This work examines a crucial part of modern presidential campaigning in Mexico: candidate appearances in municipalities. It also traces the changes in presidential campaigning over the past 30 years and finds that modern campaigning does not just involve mass media…

This paper presents a preliminary evaluation of the distribution at the household level of benefits from the Sistema de Protección Social en Salud (SPSS), or Seguro Popular, in its initial phase of operations. This health protection scheme was introduced in…

Does stronger integration in world trade affect levels of democracy? Using a system of simultaneous equations in a panel of 23 Latin American countries between 1970 and 1999, this paper assesses the possible channels through which trade may affect democracy.…