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Two political science faculty who recently joined LAS are turning heads with their impressive research productivity they are achieving early in their careers.

Olga Chyzh, assistant professor of political science and statistics, and Mark Nieman, assistant professor of political science, joined LAS in Summer 2015. The spousal team has already made an impact on the Department of Political Science.

Chyzh is a Presidential High Impact Hire with a joint appointment between the Department of Political Science and the Department of Statistics. She has five recent and forthcoming publications on topics of spatial statistics and network analysis in the Journal of Peace Research, Political Science Research and Methods, Conflict Management and Peace Science, and Foreign Policy Analysis. In an article that will appear in the Journal of Peace Research she applies recent advances in network game theory to model the competing incentives to protect or abuse human rights faced by the leaders of countries when deciding whether to engage in international trade. The Journal of Peace Research has an impact factor of 3.387, and is ranked second out of 85 journals in international relations and third out of 161 political science journals overall, according to the 2014 Journal Citation Reports® from Thomson Reuters.

Another article, forthcoming in Political Science Research and Methods, proposes statistical techniques that help make it easier to disentangle the interconnections between the formation of international networks and the effects that those networks have. The other articles apply spatial statistics to analyze diffusion of rule of law and tax extraction outcomes among international states.

Nieman, an ISU alum, has five recent and forthcoming articles on theoretical and statistical approaches to modeling interactions among strategic actors, such as leaders of international states or groups within states. These articles are published or forthcoming in the journals Political Analysis, Journal of Peace Research, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Political Science Research and Methods, and European Political Science.

In his Political Analysis article, Mark derives an original statistical estimator that allows for modeling interactions among strategic international actors in the presence of missing data. Political Analysis is ranked #1 out of 161 journals in Political Science according to the 2015 Journal Citation Reports® from Thomson Reuters, with an Impact Factor of 4.655 and a 5-year Impact Factor of 4.659. In a different article, forthcoming in Journal of Peace Research, he models strategic interactions between pairs of international states, who weigh their utility from attacking their adversaries against the ensuing costs/benefits of how such action will affect their relationship with the United States or other great powers.