Dear Applied Statistics Workshop Community,

Our next meeting of the semester will be at 12:10 pm (EST) Wednesday, September 22, where Sherry Zaks (University of Southern California) presents "Do we know it when we see it? Conceptualization and Cascading Bias in Identifying "Rebel-to-Party Transition"."

Abstract
Studies on rebel-to-party transition suggest that incorporating former-rebels into post-conflict politics creates a tenable path toward stability and democratization. Notwithstanding the salience of these results, the rebel-to-party literature is racked with an unacknowledged conceptual tension that simultaneously demands---and paves the way for---reconciliation. On the one hand, scholars exhibit remarkable convergence on both the core meaning and stakes of rebel-to-party transition. On the other hand, the literature reveals nearly as many different definitions of ``rebel-to-party transition" as there are studies of it. Conceptual imprecision and discord together have an analytic ripple effect---compromising the validity of the concept, the quality of the measure, the inclusion criteria of datasets, and the results of analyses. To address these limitations, I propose a novel conceptualization of ``rebel-to-party transition" that distinguishes among (failed) political aspirants, nominal participants, and seated participants. This framework places critical scope conditions on ``failure," adds nuance to ``success," and explicitly distinguishes between ``transition" and ``transformation". I derive frameworks for data collection and measurement and run a series of replication analyses to both test the implications of existing disparities and demonstrate the utility of the new framework.