This article introduces a new, public database of U.S. state and local public policies, now available at www.statepolicyindex.com. The database covers more than 170 different state or local policies, coded at the state level as of December 31, 2006, in most cases. We use principal components analysis and derive two orthogonal measures of state policy ideology, which we label policy liberalism and policy urbanism. Our policy liberalism measure passes several reliability and validity checks, while policy urbanism is strongly predicted by urbanization rate, percentage of African Americans in the population, and percentage of Christian adherents in the population.

This article investigates the impact of military service on the duration of a veteran's first marriage, a topic in the literature with both scant and highly contradictory conclusions. Our sample consisted of 3,800 males from the National Survey of Families and Households (1987-1994). Using hazard rate analysis, we estimate the impact of both combat and noncombat assignments on marital duration. Our statistical results imply: (1) self-reported participation in combat increases the hazard rate for marital dissolution by over 60 percent; (2) time of marriage (whether before, during, or after the war) does not affect dissolution, except for wartime marriages during WWII, where the effect is strong; and (3) the effects of war differ significantly across the major U.S. wars; surprisingly, the strongest negative impact on duration occurs with the neglected Korean War veterans.

Sorens, Jason and William Ruger. (2012) Does Foreign Investment Really Reduce Repression? International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/j.1468‐2478.2012.00722.x 
© 2012 International Studies Association Cross‐national empirical studies have found that foreign investment has beneficial effects on human rights. We argue that these studies poorly operationalize foreign investment to test theoretical predictions and suffer from sampling bias. We demonstrate that investment stock, rather than inflow, is the superior operationalization of structural dependence theory. We construct regression models of government repression of physical integrity rights, include much more data than previous studies, and use a new multiple imputation algorithm for time‐series cross‐section data to resolve sampling bias. We find no evidence that foreign investment affects repression, contradicting conventional wisdom and suggesting that the political gains from repression frequently dwarf any economic costs for governments.

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