Robert J. Carroll

I’m a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I teach courses in international relations, political economy, and formal modeling.

Contact

Email: rjc AT illinois dot edu

Working papers

• Fighting in the shadow of intervention: a learned-proxy analysis
• Making peace on the cheap
• Sunspot volatility and the price of peace
• The shape of possible states
• Preferring unified theories
• The causal content of game-theoretic models
• War and peace in the marketplace
• A theory of force
• Policy spaces as organizational schemes: a semantic theory of electoral competition
• A state is its relations: the Yoneda lemma and relational identity in international relations

Published work

• Policy devolution and cooperation dilemmas (with Chris Reenock and David Konisky) Forthcoming in Journal of Theoretical Politics.

• Strategic avoidance and rulemaking procedures (with Peter Bils and Lawrence Rothenberg) Journal of Theoretical Politics 36(2): 156–185. 2024.

• Costly signaling in autocracy (with Amy Pond) International Interactions 47(4): 612–632. 2021.

• Prediction, proxies, and power (with Brenton Kenkel) American Journal of Political Science 63(3): 577–593. 2019.

• Using item response theory to improve measurement in strategic management research: An application to corporate social responsibility (with David Primo and Brian Kelleher Richter) Strategic Management Journal 37(1): 66–85. 2016. Updated scores & methodology · GitHub

Teaching

PS 231: Strategic Models — game theory and its applications in political science Syllabus · Sample problem set · Lecture videos

PS 398: Strategic International Relations — formal methods in IR theory Syllabus · Sample problem set · Lecture notes