Research Library

Argentina's three-stage federal election cycle ended on November 22, 2015 with the victory of Mauricio Macri in a presidential runoff election, the first runoff in Argentine history. Mark Jones, political science fellow and the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies, examines the election results.

Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso, Texas, suffered an unprecedented downfall into violence and chaos between 2007 and 2012. It came to be known in 2010 as “the most dangerous city in the world.” What can cause a city to spiral downward into bloodshed and turmoil in the way that Ciudad Juárez did? This article makes the argument that the city's descent into violence and chaos is the result of a number of poor decisions made over the course of the 40 years preceding the bloodshed of the years under examination.

Nearly 50,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America and Mexico have poured across the United States’ border with Mexico in the past eight months. While Mexico, the U.S. and the Central American sending countries share responsibility for contributing to the recent surge, they also share the responsibility to find a solution.

Theory-building in border studies would go further if closer attention were paid to methods instead of the nature of borders and borderlands. Careful attention to methods would help make variables more amenable to theory building.

The emphasis is on the deterioration of the participation of the political institutions and politicians before the citizenry in Costa Rica, which shows a process of exhaustion, loss of legitimacy of institutions and actors. This process goes back a few decades and shows no sign, in the short term, of the emergence of new structures in the political system. This paper systematizes the morphology of exhaustion and identifies the trends in which the reform can be based. Such reform should be based on constitutional engineering and should support the political reform process from the tendencies of change that are expressed in the political system. Published in Revista Derecho Electoral, December 2013. In Spanish only.

This paper posits that the structure of fiscal federalism in countries like Argentina causes voters to reward fiscal expansion because they perceive that this extra spending at the margin is not financed by them, but rather by the nation at large.

The Science and Technology Policy Program reviews the complex federal R&D budget process. Published in July 2011 by Science Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress.

This article, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, examines the impact of collaboration on publication significance in the United States and the United Kingdom, world leaders in stem cell research with disparate policies. The findings suggest that national stem cell policy differences and regulatory mechanisms driving international stem cell research in both countries did not affect the frequency of international collaborations, or even the countries with which the U.S. and U.K. most often collaborated.

As the scientific community globalizes, it is increasingly important to understand the effects of international collaboration on the quality and quantity of research produced. While it is generally assumed that international collaboration enhances the quality of research, this phenomenon is not well examined. Stem cell research is unique in that it is both politically charged and a research area that often generates international collaborations, making it an ideal case through which to examine international collaborations.

The science advisor to the U.S. president has the opportunity to influence how scientific research is supported by the federal government, as well as the ways in which science and technology can be applied to meet the needs of society.