Ahmad, Abdul Waheed and Dr. Gabriella Lloyd. 2022. “Lessons from Afghanistan for Western state-building in a multipolar world.” Atlantic Council Issue Brief. Link
About: In this Issue Brief, Abdul Waheed Ahmad (a former senior national security staff member in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan) and I discuss the issues facing the democratic Afghan government and analyze the conditions that fueled the government's collapse. We conclude with recommendations for how the West can better support other developing democratic allies in precarious security situations.
Flores, Thomas E., Gabriella Lloyd, and Irfan Nooruddin. 2022. “When TED Talks, Does Anyone Listen? A New Dataset on Political Leadership” The Review of International Organizations. Link
Abstract: The Technocratic and Education Dataset (TED) provides comprehensive new data on the educational and professional backgrounds of the heads of government of all sovereign states between 1946 and 2015. TED details the educational and employment credentials of 1733 unique heads of government, and provides additional information on their demographic backgrounds and military experience. TED comes in leader-level and country-year versions. These data make three major contributions to the study of leadership. First, TED offers a longer time series than most extant data sets on leadership. Second, TED offers data on a broader cross section of countries, facilitating scholarship on a wider variety of countries, including non-OECD ones, which are excluded from many existing datasets on leaders. Third, by offering detailed data on the educational and employment experiences of leaders, TED helps scholars interested in the mechanisms underlying the effects of these experiences generate more rigorous tests of their theories. TED, therefore, represents a major step forward for those interested in leadership. In this article, we introduce TED and use it to show how the pool of international leaders has changed over time. We end with an empirical application of the data in which we use leadership characteristics to predict countries’ sovereign credit ratings. The article concludes with a discussion of other potential applications of these new data.
Lloyd, Gabriella. 2021. “New Data on UN Mission Mandates 1948-2015: Tasks Assigned to Missions in their Mandates (TAMM)” Journal of Peace Research. Link
Abstract: Tasks Assigned to Missions in their Mandates (TAMM) provides comprehensive new data on the mandates of UN missions between 1948 and 2015. Until now, datasets have described mandates in terms of their influential characteristics, such as whether they are robust or multidimensional, or placed them into broad categories driven by idiosyncratic theoretical expectations. Despite limitations on data availability, mandates have been tied to numerous outcomes related to peacekeeping effectiveness. TAMM meets the need for flexible, minimally processed, and fine-grained data on mission mandates by recording the full range of tasks in mandates. The dataset comes in mission-resolution and mission-month versions that are designed to complement existing data on peacekeeping and to be easily adaptable to a wide range of research interests. In this article, I introduce TAMM and use the data to conduct a replication and expansion of Hultman, Kathman and Shannon (2014). I find evidence that missions with mandates that dictate they provide security guarantees and raise the costs of fighting, reduce battlefield hostilities.
Golder, Matt and Gabriella Lloyd. 2014. “Re-evaluating the Relationship between Electoral Rules and Ideological Congruence” European Journal of Political Research, 53(1):200-212. Link
Abstract: Two new studies challenge the prevailing consensus that proportional representation (PR) systems produce greater ideological congruence between governments and their citizens than majoritarian ones. This has led to what has become known as the ‘ideological congruence controversy’. G. Bingham Powell claims to resolve this controversy in favour of PR systems. Specifically, he argues that the results from the two new studies are based on an anomalous decade and that PR systems generally do produce greater government congruence. In addition, he also asserts that PR systems exhibit less variability in government congruence. In this article, the empirical evidence for these two claims is re-evaluated using exactly the same data as employed by Powell. The analysis indicates that although PR systems produce better and more consistent representation in the legislature, they do not hold an advantage when it comes to representation at the governmental level.