Papers by Angela O'Mahony
Reforming the Teaching and Conducting of Policy Studies to Deal Better with Complex Systems
Limited Print and Electronic Distribution Rights This document and trademark(s) contained herein ... more Limited Print and Electronic Distribution Rights This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.html. The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.
Panel Discussion: Moving Social-Behavioral Modeling Forward
RAND Corporation eBooks, 2020
This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND... more This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions. The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.
Defense Institution Building in Africa
This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND... more This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.html. The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.
RAND Corporation eBooks, 2016
This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND... more This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.html. The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.
Representing qualitative social science in computational models to aid reasoning under uncertainty: National security examples
The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation, Dec 9, 2016
Representing causal social science knowledge in models is difficult: much of the best knowledge i... more Representing causal social science knowledge in models is difficult: much of the best knowledge is qualitative and ambiguously conditional, unlike the knowledge in “physics models.” This paper describes a stream of RAND research that began with qualitative models providing a structured depiction of casual factors creating effects. That has subsequently been extended to an unusual kind of uncertainty sensitive computational modeling that enables exploratory reasoning and analysis. We illustrate the approach with applications to counterterrorism, detection of terrorists, and nuclear crises. We believe that the approach will complement other approaches that can reflect social science phenomena [see other papers in this special issue of JDMS] and that the approach has broad potential within and beyond the national security domain. We also believe that it has the potential to inform empirical work—encouraging a transition from the step-by-step empirical testing of simple discrete hypotheses to the testing and refinement of more comprehensive causal models.
International Studies Quarterly, Nov 22, 2014
Conventional wisdom holds that voters in developing countries fail to punish pervasive pre-electo... more Conventional wisdom holds that voters in developing countries fail to punish pervasive pre-electoral fiscal manipulation. However, we argue that governments are unlikely to engage in pre-electoral fiscal manipulation when facing a high risk of speculative currency attacks. In particular, under fixed exchange rates, governments are less likely to engage in fiscal electioneering when either their real exchange rate is highly appreciated or their foreign exchange reserves are low. In contrast, under a flexible exchange rate, neither a country's real exchange rate nor its reserves affects governments' decision to engage in fiscal manipulation. Our argument receives support through a quantitative analysis of government budget balances in 97 developing countries from 1975 to 2005.
A Complex-Systems Agenda for Influencing Policy Studies
Springer proceedings in complexity, 2021
SOF Partner Assessment: Introduction to Country Characteristics
In order to help the United States Special Operations Command identify countries to participate i... more In order to help the United States Special Operations Command identify countries to participate in the Global Special Operations Forces (SOF) Network, researchers needed to assess countries' political attractiveness and reliability as SOF partners comparatively, objectively, and transparently. Part one of a four-part video series describes the consistent metrics established to do so: Foreign Relations, State Stability, and Political Environment.
RAND Corporation eBooks, 2018
This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND... more This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions. The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.
The Global Landpower Network
What is the global landpower network and what value might it provide?
Defense & Security Analysis, Jul 3, 2017
ABSTRACT US national security guidance, as well as the US Army’s operational experiences since 20... more ABSTRACT US national security guidance, as well as the US Army’s operational experiences since 2001, emphasizes the importance of working closely with partner countries to achieve US strategic objectives. The US Army has introduced the global landpower network (GLN) concept as a means to integrate, sustain and advance the Army’s considerable ongoing efforts to meet US national security guidance. This study develops the GLN concept further, and addresses three questions. What benefits can the GLN provide the Army? What are the essential components of the GLN? What options exist for implementing the GLN concept? By developing the GLN concept, the Army has the opportunity to transition the GLN from an often ad hoc and reactive set of relationships to one that the Army more self-consciously prioritizes and leverages as a resource to meet US strategic objectives.
Challenges for Social and Behavioral Research and Its Modeling
This paper summarizes priority challenges for social and behavioral modeling based on a recent st... more This paper summarizes priority challenges for social and behavioral modeling based on a recent study building on a base of prior studies. Our focus is less on describing and hand- wringing about the current state than on identifying what is necessary for moving on. Some of the obstacles reflect inherent challenges: social systems are complex adaptive systems; they often pose "wicked problems;" and even the structure of social systems shows emergent behavior. Other obstacles reflect disciplinary norms and practices, mindsets, and numerous very difficult scientific and methodological challenges. We discuss challenges in six groups: (1) tightening links among theory, modeling, and both empirical and computational experimentation; (2) seeking more general and coherent theories while retaining alternative perspectives and narratives, and while effectively confronting multidimensional uncertainty from the outset; (3) assuring that explanatory models represent science faithfully, to include addressing aspects and determinants of behavior that have often been omitted or treated with hard-wired representations; (4) challenging experimenters to find new theory-informed (but not theory-imposing) ways to obtain and analyze relevant data in this modern era of ubiquitous data; (5) challenging theorists and technologists to provide related methods and tools; and (6) nurturing the rest of the ecology needed for overall effectiveness. We suggest identifying several national challenge problems and, for each, having a distributed and virtual social and behavioral laboratory to stimulate synthetic interdisciplinary work. These should feature mixed methods (not just classic simulation) and competition, but also frameworks, modularity, and problem-focused composition---again with competition and evolution--- rather than an imagery of standing "correct" federations. Experience shows that breakthroughs often occur as the result of solving concrete problems and then recognizing more general patterns.
The Journal of Politics, Jul 1, 2010
Pre-electoral fiscal manipulation-spending more or taxing less prior to an election-is an importa... more Pre-electoral fiscal manipulation-spending more or taxing less prior to an election-is an important tool that governments possess to enhance their chances for reelection. Existing explanations of pre-electoral fiscal manipulation focus primarily on domestic characteristics. We extend this line of inquiry by examining international influences on governments' decisions to engage in pre-electoral fiscal manipulation. We find that international scrutiny of the economy and international scrutiny of elections affect pre-electoral fiscal manipulation in cross-cutting ways. Using data from 1990 to 2004 for 94 developing countries, we show that pre-electoral fiscal manipulation is more likely when international election monitors make direct election manipulation more difficult, and it is less likely when governments are subject to international economic scrutiny resulting from an IMF agreement.
Social Media Data and the Dynamics of Thai Protests
Asian journal of social science, 2015
Traditional techniques used to study political engagement—interviews, ethnographic research, surv... more Traditional techniques used to study political engagement—interviews, ethnographic research, surveys—rely on collection of data at a single or a few points in time and/or from a small sample of political actors. They lead to a tendency in the literature to focus on “snapshots” of political engagement (as in the analysis of a single survey) or draw from a very limited set of sources (as in most small group ethnographic work and interviewing). Studying political engagement through analysis of social media data allows scholars to better understand the political engagement of millions of people by examining individuals’ views on politics in their own voices. While social media analysis has important limitations, it provides the opportunity to see detailed “video” of political engagement over time that provides an important complement to traditional methods. We illustrate this point by drawing on social media data analysis of the protests and election in Thailand from October 2013 through February 2014.
RAND Corporation eBooks, 2018
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Papers by Angela O'Mahony