Kurt Taylor Gaubatz, the author of A Survivor’s Guide to R, is an independent scholar and analyst in Washington DC. He has previously held faculty appointments at Stanford University, Oxford (Nuffield College) where he was the Visiting John G. Winant Lecturer in American Foreign Policy, and in the Graduate Program in International Studies at Old Dominion University. In 1996-97 he was the Susan Louise Dyer Peace Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. In 1993-1994 he held a Pew Faculty Fellowship in International Affairs from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Dr. Gaubatz’s primary scholarship focuses on the relationship between democratic politics and international relations. More specifically, he works in three broad and interconnected areas: the relationship between regime type and international relations, the strategic behavior of politicians who must balance domestic and international incentives, and the relationship between democratic politics and international law.
He did his undergraduate work in economics at U.C.Berkeley. He holds masters degrees in international law from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and in theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. His PhD is in political science from Stanford University. In addition to The Survivor’s Guide to R, he is the author of Elections and War (Stanford Univ. Press, 1999, paperback 2002), and Quantifying the Qualitative (SAGE, 2016. with Katya Drozdova). He has published a number of articles on international law and on the relationship between domestic politics and international relations. His work has appeared in World Politics, International Organization, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, and other leading journals. He has served as a principle investigator with the Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center, coordinating two large funded projects for the Department of Defense on modeling in the social sciences and on Bayesian statistics in social network analysis.