An even more laden cart

1.5 hours compiling data, 3 hours analyzing data, 0.5 hours emailing and planning travel, page count = 203

Welcome to this week's monitor, Geordan Drummond, in Philadelphia!

The count includes some time on Saturday. I had requested some Uruguayan ministerial reports from the main branch of the library a few weeks ago, and they arrived - all 69 volumes! It wasn't clear from the catalog which years they had, so the very helpful librarian sent over everything in the date range that interested me from off-site storage. As it turns out, only 24 of them are relevant or potentially relevant for me, which is still a considerable amount. Unfortunately, I left my laptop adapter at the library that afternoon, and didn't realize until this morning. Fortunately, they still had it at the reference desk, although it was impossible to determine that before by phone. At least the trip wasn't wasted.

So I've started analyzing all the data I've compiled over the last several weeks, and some interesting things are emerging. The relationships are not what I expected them to be, which generates a lot of questions: Are what I've compiled the right measures? Did I take the right endpoint for the state formation process? What are the mechanisms that connect security-force configurations and regime outcomes? I have to rethink a lot of things; what's interesting is that there does appear to be a relationship cross-nationally, but not in the direction I anticipated. Intriguing. And Colombia looks militarized by this particular measure, which leads me to believe there's something I'm missing. There are two directions I'll pursue: one is identifying if I have the right end-date for state formation. For some countries, I feel good about the 1910-14 range. For others, it may have happened later. The other is to incorporate population size, so I can get a sense of militarization per capita and not just in absolute terms. Since the countries in question have a wide variation in terms of population, that may be distorting this particular measure.

In any event, I ought to have enough to process this information and write it up this week so I can send along the revised Chapter 1 for comments in anticipation of participating in the department seminar at Berkeley on April 16th. As you'll see from the updated header, I'm now projecting to finish and file in May. Graduation is May 19th, although technically I will file in the summer semester (when it's much cheaper), which starts on May 28th. The end is in sight!