Stockholm university

Steven MillerSenior Lecturer, Docent

About me

I use statistics and machine learning to understand why people adopt authoritarian political beliefs or embrace autocratic leaders in response to real or perceived threats. This puts my research and teaching interests at the broad intersection of international conflict and political behavior. My research outputs have appeared in peer-reviewed journals like Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Political Behavior, and Political Research Quarterly, to name a few. More recent research is funded by the National Science Foundation and has even been highlighted in newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • The Militarized Interstate Confrontation Dataset, 1816-2014

    2023. Douglas M. Gibler, Steven V. Miller. Journal of Conflict Resolution

    Article

    We use this article to introduce the Militarized Interstate Confrontation (MIC) dataset, 1816-2014—a new dataset for international conflict with a host of innovative features. The MIC data corrects thousands of errors in existing interstate conflict data and provides fatality ranges for all conflicts, with meaningful fatality estimates and no missing fatality values. Thus, the MIC data fixes missing data problems that have precluded researchers from analyzing escalation and related issues because of the lack of integrated conflict and war data. We also identify and distribute separate datasets for state-versus-citizen actions that are protest-dependent. These are attacks on shipping, fishing boats, and rebels, which were previously included in the data because the sovereign of those private citizens protested. We discuss our systematic search for new conflict cases and the 108 new conflicts we found, and we provide analyses and summaries that demonstrate the usefulness of our MIC data. Finally, we use our new data to create the first ever dataset of truly dyadic, directed dyad-year data, with highest actions and fatalities that vary appropriately within conflicts by both year and dyad. We believe these datasets will be useful for a host of studies but especially those interested in how conflicts evolve over time. 

    Read more about The Militarized Interstate Confrontation Dataset, 1816-2014
  • {peacesciencer}: An R package for quantitative peace science research

    2022. Steven Miller. Conflict Management and Peace Science 39 (6), 755-779

    Article

    This article introduces { peacesciencer} , an R package that contains a litany of tools for creating data of widespread interest to the peace science community. The package is cross-platform, assuming only a somewhat recent installation of the R programming language with some of the enhanced functionality of the broadly popular { tidvyerse} packages. Peace science researchers can use this package to greatly reduce the time needed to perfectly recreate common types of data from scratch and to merge in ubiquitous indicators included in almost every analysis (e.g. democracy data, contiguity data). The software is freely available on CRAN and maintains an active website documenting its features at http://svmiller.com/peacesciencer.

    Read more about {peacesciencer}
  • The Militarized Interstate Events (MIE) dataset, 1816–2014

    2023. Douglas M. Gibler, Steven V. Miller. Conflict Management and Peace Science

    Article

    We use this article to introduce the Militarized Interstate Events (MIE) dataset, a new dataset for international conflict with a host of innovative features. The MIE data offers dyadic, event-level information for all militarized interstate confrontations from 1816 to 2014, including major wars as well as all threats, displays, and uses of force between two or more states. The data come with major innovations, including dyadic fatality estimates at the event level and recorded events for general conflicts alongside the battles of the wars of the last two centuries. We discuss how to use these conflict data and provide a replication that demonstrates the dataset's usefulness. 

    Read more about The Militarized Interstate Events (MIE) dataset, 1816–2014

Show all publications by Steven Miller at Stockholm University