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Generell gibt es zwei Kriterien, um die Angemessenheit einer jeden Methode zu beurteilen, unabhängig davon, ob das Verfahren quantitativer oder qualitativer Natur ist. So sollte ein geschätzter Zusammenhang zum einen unverzerrt sein, was sich auch als Erwartungstreue oder Absenz eines Bias bezeichnen lässt. Zum anderen sollten die Resultate, die ein Verfahren bei Replikationen erbringt, eine geringe Varianz aufweisen und somit "effizient" sein. Der Übersichtsartikel zu quantitativen Methoden im Rahmen des Handbuchs der Internationalen Politik verdeutlich zunächst diese beiden Kriterien der "Effizienz" und "Erwartungstreue". Der Beitrag zeigt typische Probleme der Datenanalyse anhand von Beispielen aus dem Bereich der internationalen Politik auf. Anschließend geht der Beitrag auf den aktuellen Forschungsstand sowie auf einige der zentralen Herausforderungen und neueren Entwicklungen ein, die zur Zeit im Bereich der Methoden diskutiert werden. (ICB2)

Despite many claims by high-ranking policy-makers and some scientists that climate change breeds violent conflict, the existing empirical literature has so far not been able to identify a systematic, causal relationship of this kind. This may either reflect de facto absence of such a relationship, or it may be the consequence of theoretical and methodological limitations of existing work. We revisit the climate–conflict issue along two lines. First, at the theoretical level we specify the mechanism through which climate change is likely to affect the risk of armed conflict. We focus on the causal chain linking climatic conditions, economic growth, and armed conflict, and also argue that the growth–conflict part of this chain is contingent on political system characteristics. Second, at the methodological level, we develop an approach that takes care of endogeneity problems in the climate–economy–conflict relationship. We test our theoretical argument on a global data set for 1950-2004. The results show that the climate change–conflict hypothesis rests on rather shaky empirical foundations: we do find some negative effects of climate change on economic growth, while stronger economic growth is associated with a lower probability of civil conflict. However, the climate change effect on growth is not robust to changes in climate indicators and samples. Our results also indicate that non- democratic countries are more likely to experience armed conflict when economic conditions deteriorate. Our results suggest that investing in climate-friendly economic growth and democracy can qualify as a no-regrets strategy.

In this paper we are interested in the relationship between globalization, political institutions (notably, democracy) and international environmental commitments. This relationship has been the subject of a particularly intensive debate and the existing literature offers a wide range of partly competing claims with respect to the driving forces of international environmental cooperation. While some authors argue that democracy and globalization tend to promote international efforts to mitigate or resolve environmental problems others have challenged these propositions theoretically and empirically. We argue that existing studies suffer from three weaknesses. First, they are based on very small samples of multilateral environmental treaties in respect to which commitment is coded (usually in terms of treaty ratification) and are cross-sectional. Second, they examine the effects of globalization and political institutions on international environmental policy separately and ignore potential joint effects. Third, they ignore interdependency (diffusion) effects - i.e., they do not account for the possibility that international commitment of one country is likely to depend on what other countries and specific types or groups of other countries do (network effects). Based on a new panel dataset that includes the commitments of 180 countries with regard to international environmentaltreaties from 1902 to 2005 we study whether and how international economic and political integration, and domestic political institutions jointly affect international environmental commitments. We also study interdependency (network) effects on our dependent variable. Our preliminary results show that the net effect of democracy on environmental cooperation is rather diffuse and so is the effect of economic integration (trade openness).