Robert Kubinec

Robert Kubinec is a political scientist who studies the influence of powerful business interests on policy outcomes in developing countries, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, he is involved in the development of Bayesian statistical methods for measuring difficult topics like corruption and political ideology. Previously, he was a fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University.

Education:

• 2018 PhD in Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia
• 2010 MA in Middle East Studies, George Washington University
• 2008 BA in International Relations, Wheaton College

Research Areas:

Middle East Political Economy; Online Sampling Techniques; Computational Bayesian Statistics

Books

• 2022 (In Press). Kubinec, Robert. Making Democracy Safe for Business: Corporate Politics During the Arab Uprisings. Cambridge University Press.

Journal Articles

• 2022 Kubinec, Robert.“Ordered Beta Regression: A Parsimonious, Well-Fitting Model for Continuous Data with Lower and Upper Bounds.” Forthcoming Political Analysis.
• 2022 Barcelo, Joan; Kubinec, Robert; Cheng, Cindy; Hoye Rahn, Tiril; and Messerschmidt, Luca. “Windows of Repression: Using COVID-19 Policies against Political Dissidents?” Journal of Peace Research doi:10.1177/00223433211062389.
• 2021 Kubinec, Robert; Lee, Haillie and Tomashevskiy, Andrey. “Politically-Connected Companies Are Less Likely to Shutdown Due to COVID-19 Restrictions.” Social Science Quarterly. doi:10.1111/ssqu.13040.
• 2020 Kubinec, Robert and Owen, John. “When Groups Fall Apart: Identifying Transnational Polarization with Twitter from the Arab Uprisings.” Political Analysis doi:10.1017/pan.2020.46.
• 2020 Cheng, Cindy; Barcelo, Joan; Hartnett, Allison; Kubinec, Robert and Messerschmidt, Luca. “COVID-19 Government Response Event Dataset (CoronaNet v.1.0).” Nature Human Behavior. doi:10.1038/s41562-020-0909-7.
• 2020 Kropko, Jonathan and Kubinec, Robert. “Why the Two-way Fixed Effects Model is Difficult to Interpret, and What to Do About It.” PLOS One. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0231349

Courses Taught

• Data and Society
• Comparative Politics of the Middle East
• Political Economy of the Middle East