Evidence-Driven Computational Modeling

Bhavnani, Ravi; Donnay, Karsten; Reul, Mirko

doi:10.4135/9781526486387.n7

The SAGE Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations 2020

DOI: 10.4135/9781526486387.n7

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Evidence-Driven Computational Modeling

Ravi Bhavnani¹,

Karsten Donnay²,

Mirko Reul³

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2023

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Cited by 3 publications

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“…Prior work operationalizes resilience as a household-level characteristic, capturing the ability of individual households to cope with shocks and stressors. The approach we develop integrates measurements at different units of analysis (Brown et al, 2020;Bakhtsiyarava and Grace, 2021;Grace et al, 2022;Wang and Do, 2023), tracing how household behavior shapes resilience at the ward-level while accounting for feedback loops and nonlinear scaling processes (Béné et al, 2015;Béné, 2020;Bhavnani et al, 2020Bhavnani et al, , 2023. In a given ward, we measure how many children across households fall above/below the malnutrition threshold and to what extent.…”

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confidence: 99%

Trajectories of resilience to acute malnutrition in the Kenyan drylands

Bhavnani¹,

Schlager²,

Reul³

et al. 2023

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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IntroductionInsight into the resilience of local food systems—variability driven by climate, conflict, and food price shocks—is critical for the treatment and prevention of child acute malnutrition.MethodsWe use a combination of latent class mixed modeling and time-to-event analysis to develop and test a measure of resilience that is outcome-based, sensitive to specific shocks and stressors, and captures the enduring effects of how frequently and severely children face the risk of acute malnutrition.ResultsHarnessing a high-resolution longitudinal dataset with anthropometric information on 5,597 Kenyan households for the 2016–20 period, we identify resilience trajectories for 141 wards across Kenya. These trajectories—characterized by variation in the duration and severity of episodes of acute malnutrition—are associated with differential risk: (1) some 57% of wards exhibit an increasing trajectory—high household risk despite growing resilience; (2) 39% exhibit chronic characteristics—showing no real signs of recovery after an episode of crisis; (3) 3% exhibit robust characteristics—low variability with low-levels of individual household risk; whereas (4) 1% show a steady decrease in resilience—associated with high levels household risk.DiscussionOur findings highlight the importance of measuring resilience at the ward-level in order to better understand variation in the nutritional status of rural households.

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confidence: 99%

Trajectories of resilience to acute malnutrition in the Kenyan drylands

Bhavnani¹,

Schlager²,

Reul³

et al. 2023

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

Self Cite

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Household behavior and vulnerability to acute malnutrition in Kenya

Bhavnani

Schlager

Donnay

et al. 2023

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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Anticipating those most at-risk of being acutely malnourished significantly shapes decisions that pertain to resource allocation and intervention in times of food crises. Yet, the assumption that household behavior in times of crisis is homogeneous—that households share the same capacity to adapt to external shocks—ostensibly prevails. This assumption fails to explain why, in a given geographical context, some households remain more vulnerable to acute malnutrition relative to others, and why a given risk factor may have a differential effect across households? In an effort to explore how variation in household behavior influences vulnerability to malnutrition, we use a unique household dataset that spans 23 Kenyan counties from 2016 to 2020 to seed, calibrate, and validate an evidence-driven computational model. We use the model to conduct a series of counterfactual experiments on the relationship between household adaptive capacity and vulnerability to acute malnutrition. Our findings suggest that households are differently impacted by given risk factors, with the most vulnerable households typically being the least adaptive. These findings further underscore the salience of household adaptive capacity, in particular, that adaption is less effective for economic vis-à-vis climate shocks. By making explicit the link between patterns of household behavior and vulnerability in the short- to medium-term, we underscore the need for famine early warning to better account for variation in household-level behavior.

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How Loyalty Trials Shape Allegiance to Political Order

Reul,

Bhavnani

2023

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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“Loyalty trials” are common to a range of conflict settings, with consequences that range from harassment to imprisonment, torture, or death. Yet, they have received little if any attention as a general phenomenon in studies of state repression, civil war, or rebel governance, which focus on particular behaviors that authorities use to put people on trial, such as dissent, defection, and resistance. Using a computational model and data on the German Democratic Republic and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, we focus on the dynamics of “loyalty trials” held to identify enemy collaborators—the interaction between expectations, perceptions, and behavior. We use our framework to explore the conditions under which trials result in widespread defection, as in the German Democratic Republic, or in conformity as illustrated by our study of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The polarizing nature of loyalty trials and the propensity to over- or under-identify threats to political order have notable implications for democratic and non-democratic societies alike.

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Evidence-Driven Computational Modeling

Cited by 3 publications

References 31 publications

Trajectories of resilience to acute malnutrition in the Kenyan drylands

Trajectories of resilience to acute malnutrition in the Kenyan drylands

Household behavior and vulnerability to acute malnutrition in Kenya

How Loyalty Trials Shape Allegiance to Political Order

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