Cline Center News and Announcements

The Cline Center is pleased to announce the 2026-2027 David F. Linowes Faculty Fellows: Assistant Professor Don Casler and Assistant Professor Elisha Cohen, both of the School of Political Science.

The Linowes Faculty Fellowship supports scholars whose work demonstrates the potential to make significant contributions to research and public understanding. This year's fellows exemplify the interdisciplinary and data-driven approach that lies at the heart of the Cline Center's mission, leveraging unique datasets and analytical tools to investigate pressing questions in public policy, governance, and international affairs.

Prof. Casler's project aims to understand why some leaders respond to domestic political violence by becoming more aggressive in foreign policy, while others become more cautious.

To address this puzzle, the study links data from the Cline Center's Coup d'État Project with information about leaders' behavior in international disputes. It also uses the Cline Center's Global News Index and Archer toolkit to analyze trends in media coverage before and after instances of political violence.

Understanding why some, but not all, leaders become more hawkish in these cases holds important implications for international security. The project will provide new insights into how domestic instability shapes international behavior and may help improve our understanding of the conditions under which political violence influences global conflict dynamics.

Professor Cohen's project aims to understand how and when third-party oversight through consent decrees and oversight boards affects police behavior. The ability to hold police accountable for misconduct is a necessary component of a trustworthy and legitimate institution. In recent years, there has been renewed attention to police oversight methods and the changes, if any, they have had on police behavior.

This study will use the Cline Center's SPOTLITE data on police use of force to examine police oversight efforts in Illinois and across the United States. By analyzing the relationship between oversight mechanisms and police behavior, the project seeks to contribute evidence to ongoing discussions about accountability, institutional legitimacy, and public trust in law enforcement.

You can learn more about their projects and the Linowes Fellowship here: https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/get-involved/LinowesFellows

The SPOTLITE team is releasing the Anomaly Detector Dashboard, a new tool designed to identify U.S. counties with unusually high or low numbers of law enforcement uses of lethal force relative to national benchmarks.

Built on SPOTLITE's database of more than 28,000 law enforcement lethal force incidents from 2014-2023, the anomaly detector uses county population, population density, and civilian gun violence (from Gun Violence Archive[tag]) to estimate how many incidents would be expected in each county. It then compares those expectations to observed incidents to identify counties with substantially more or fewer incidents than predicted.

The anomaly detector is not intended to explain why counties differ or to label counties as "good" or "bad." Instead, it provides a consistent, data-driven way to identify places that warrant closer examination and to generate new questions for researchers, journalists, policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and community stakeholders.

We've also released a downloadable dataset and white paper describing the anomaly detector's purpose, methodology, interpretation, and limitations.

We are excited to announce the Cline Center’s 2026 Schroeder Fellows: Jaeyoung Lee and Shuyan (Michael) Huang. This summer, both fellows will pursue innovative research on how foreign aid is framed, interpreted, and debated across different contexts.

Jaeyoung Lee’s project examines the relationship between elite media framing and foreign aid policy at a time when major donors such as the United States and the United Kingdom are reassessing aid priorities. Drawing on the Cline Center’s Global News Index, the project analyzes decades of New York Times and BBC coverage to identify when foreign aid is framed as a moral obligation versus a national strategy. The research evaluates whether shifts in media narratives precede policy change or follow institutional transformations, highlighting the role of news coverage in shaping political consensus.

Michael Huang’s project examines how foreign aid has been narrated in Pakistan from the Cold War to the present, focusing on recipient-country media perspectives. Using Urdu newspaper archives, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, the BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, and the Cline Center’s Global News Index, the project analyzes how aid has been framed as partnership, dependence, strategic bargaining, development assistance, debt burden, or external interference across donors and geopolitical moments. The research traces how these narratives shape public trust in donors and explain variation in the political meaning of foreign assistance.

We look forward to supporting Michael and Jaeyoung this summer and to sharing insights from their work.

The Illinois Accountability Commission (IAC) released its final report this week examining societal instability events involving federal government actors in the Chicagoland area during the period surrounding Operation Midway Blitz.

The report draws extensively on data and analysis produced by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research and its Firewatch Project. At the request of the Commission, the Cline Center conducted a systematic review of journalistic reporting and publicly available federal data to document protests, acts of political violence, and destabilizing governmental actions occurring in the region between September 1, 2025 and January 30, 2026.

The Cline Center’s analysis is presented in its report, Overview of Societal Instability Events Involving Federal Government Actors in the Chicagoland Area from September 1, 2025 through January 30, 2026. Using transparent and replicable methods, the study provides a minimum count of documented events based on credible news coverage and an independent analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest data for the state of Illinois.

The full Cline Center report is part of an ongoing statewide data collection effort documenting societal instability events from January 20, 2025 through March 31, 2026. As data collection continues, future updates may identify additional events or provide more detailed classifications.

Coups d'Ètat are important events in the life of a country. They constitute an important subset of irregular transfers of political power that can have significant and enduring consequences for national well-being. There are only a limited number of datasets available to study these events (Powell and Thyne 2011, Marshall and Marshall 2019). Seeking to facilitate research on post-WWII coups by compiling a more comprehensive list and categorization of these events, the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research (previously the Cline Center for Democracy) initiated the Coup d’État Project as part of its Societal Infrastructures and Development (SID) project. More specifically, this dataset identifies the outcomes of coup events (i.e., realized, unrealized, or conspiracy), the type of actor(s) who initiated the coup (i.e., military, rebels, etc.), as well as the fate of the deposed leader.

This version of the dataset (v2.2.2) extends the data published in January 2025 by adding new events and updating the coding of existing ones. It now contains 1,161 events in 143 countries (472 successful coups, 408 attempted coups, and 281 coup conspiracies). It also fixes an error in version 2.2.1 in which the “conspiracy” designation was mistakenly assigned to coup_id: 40411262025.  To learn more or to download the dataset, please use the following link: Link to the dataset.

Coups d'Ètat are important events in the life of a country. They constitute an important subset of irregular transfers of political power that can have significant and enduring consequences for national well-being. There are only a limited number of datasets available to study these events (Powell and Thyne 2011, Marshall and Marshall 2019). Seeking to facilitate research on post-WWII coups by compiling a more comprehensive list and categorization of these events, the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research (previously the Cline Center for Democracy) initiated the Coup d’État Project as part of its Societal Infrastructures and Development (SID) project. More specifically, this dataset identifies the outcomes of coup events (i.e., realized, unrealized, or conspiracy) the type of actor(s) who initiated the coup (i.e., military, rebels, etc.), as well as the fate of the deposed leader.

Version 2.2.1 adds 67 additional coup events. 47 of these came from examining the Colpus dataset (Chin, Carter, and Wright 2021) and 20 of these events were added to the data set in the normal annual review of potential new coup events. This version also updates the coding to events in Mali in 2012, Serbia in 2000 and Chad in 1979.  To download the dataset please use the following link: Link to the dataset.

The number of police-involved lethal force incidents in the U.S. dropped 24% from 2021 to 2023, as revealed in the latest release of national SPOTLITE data by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research.  This latest release of SPOTLITE data also offers, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of the demographic characteristics of civilians involved in police uses of lethal force across the U.S., including incidents without lethal outcomes. SPOTLITE is the most authoritative nationwide accounting of police uses of lethal force available today. It includes any incident in which police used a firearm — including those with nonfatal outcomes — as well as any other use of force that resulted in a death. The SPOTLITE dashboard lets anyone explore past uses of lethal force by police for every county in the United States. For more background on the project, visit https://news.illinois.edu/research-police-uses-of-lethal-force-dropped-dramatically-in-us-from-2021-23/.

The Cline Center is pleased to announce the 2025-2026 David F. Linowes Faculty Fellows: Assistant Professor JungHwan Yang of the Department of Communication and Associate Professor Yun Huang of the School of Information Sciences.

Linowes Fellowships support scholars whose work is relevant to Cline Center initiatives and who plan to use Cline Center data and technology in innovative projects.

Professor Casler’s project aims to understand why some political leaders respond to traumatic events by becoming more aggressive, while others become more cautious, in the domain of foreign policy. Though leaders generally want to stay in power, different leaders often respond quite differently to otherwise similar circumstances, even when their very lives are at stake. To address this puzzle, the study links data from the Cline Center’s Coup d’etat Project with information about leaders’ hawkishness and behavior in international disputes. It also uses the Cline Center’s Global News Index and Archer toolkit to analyze trends in media coverage before and after instances of political violence. Understanding why some, but not all leaders become more hawkish in these cases holds important implications for international security. 

Professor Huang's project aims to advance public understanding and critical analysis of the SPOTLITE dataset through AI-supported, persona-driven interactions. Specifically, by designing AI personas—ranging from scholarly and policy-oriented to civic and community-based—the proposed solutions will empower user, e.g., students, researchers, and stakeholders, to engage more deeply with complex data, reducing the risk of misinterpretation or bias. The research will generate design insights for the responsible use of AI in sensitive contexts, contribute to HCI scholarship, workforce training in data literacy and decision-making, and more meaningful public engagement across multi-stakeholder groups. 

You can learn more about their projects and the Linowes Fellowship here: https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/get-involved/LinowesFellows

We are pleased to announce the Cline Center’s 2025 Schroeder Summer Fellowships.  This year, the fellows are: 

Larissa Migotto Brandolt - Larissa’s research looks at how the U.S. media covers undemocratic events differently based on media ideology and whether the events happen at home or abroad. She is focusing on the January 6th Capitol attack and the January 8th attack on Brazil’s government buildings. Working with the Global News Index (GNI) and the Archer system from the Cline Center, she will investigate how partisan outlets use different language, assign blame, and frame these events over time. Using framing theory and a mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis, she will look at how media narratives shape public opinion and views of democratic stability. This research contributes to the literature on political communication, polarization, and democratic erosion, and offers insights into how the media shapes public response to undemocratic political events.

 Do Young Gong - Do Young’s project examines how wartime coup attempts influence civil war dynamics in both the short and long term. Using the Cline Center’s Coup d’État Project Dataset, it first investigates how such coups affect short-term ceasefires and long-term peace agreements of civil wars. Additionally, by drawing on media sentiment scores from the Global News Index and anti-government protest data from the Cline Center’s Historical Phoenix Event Dataset, the project explores how post-coup governments restore stability and how that shapes prospects for civil war resolution. This project expands our understanding of conflict by uncovering the critical role of government instability—often overlooked in civil war studies—and revealing how different forms of violence are deeply interconnected.

The Schroeder Summer Graduate Fellowship Program is made possible by a generous gift from William A. and Paul W. Schroeder. The program aims to enhance the quality of rigorous research on topics that fall within ongoing research programs at the Cline Center by helping graduate students in Political Science at the University of Illinois generate original and publishable research early in their graduate career. 

Mitigating Online Political Harms: The Importance of- and Examples of- Scientific Assessment of Proposed Responses (Flyer)

April 9th, 2025 3:00-4:30 in Room 1092 Lincoln Hall

Description: It seems that almost as soon as we became aware of the potential for online harms in the political realm, people have been proposing potential mitigation strategies. Social scientists can play a very important role here by employing our methodological training to assess the effectiveness of such interventions. In his keynote address, Tucker will argue that after a decade of research in this regard, we need to have renewed appreciation for the importance of such intervention testing work, as we have repeatedly learned that not all interventions work as one would expect – and in some cases even have the opposite effect from the one intended.  The address will highlight multiple examples of these types of findings from Tucker’s prior research and will conclude with a look forward to the lessons we should be learning from these experiences as we think about the growing intersection of Generative AI and the online digital information ecosystem.

 Joshua A. Tucker is a Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of Politics, an affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and an affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University.  He is the Director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia. He is one of the co-founders and co-Directors of the NYU  Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP).