Richard W. Frank

Richard W. Frank

Senior Lecturer

Blog posts

2026

What does an undergraduate politics degree look like? It depends on where you study

3 minute read

Published:

How should a political science department construct its undergraduate degree? This is a question that shapes the studies of hundreds of thousands of students around the world, yet almost everything we know about political science curriculum design comes from a single country. For over two-thirds of recent published research on political science curricula looks only at the United States. My new open-access article in the Australian Journal of Political Science asks what happens when we look beyond the US.

2025

Why are some elections violent and others peaceful? After analyzing 65 studies, the answer is surprisingly thin

4 minute read

Published:

Why do some elections turn violent while others are held off peacefully? This is a serious question, given that roughly one in five national elections sees some form of election-related violence, and that this violence can signal democratic backsliding and, at the extreme, tip a country toward civil war. Yet after more than a decade of quantitative research, the field still lacks an agreed-upon set of factors that reliably distinguish violent elections from peaceful ones. My new open-source article in the Journal of Peace Research asks a deceptively simple question of this fast-growing literature: across all the studies, which predictors hold up to scrutiny?