Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank my advisor Professor Rebecca Steorts for her guidance and support throughout my thesis. Thank you for inspiring me and teaching me how to approach statistics research, and thank you for sending me to my first academic conference in France, which was such an eye-opening and memorable experience. I would also like to thank Neil Marchant for his help during the process. Thank you for always being so patient with my questions and for letting me use your software package. I learned a lot from you. Thank you to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group for answering questions related to my analysis of this work. Finally, I want to thank Professor Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, Amy Herring and Jerry Reiter for their help and support throughout this year.