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We provide a new perspective on how domestic factors shape the prospects for international cooperation. Internal arms, specifically conscription, signal a willingness and suitability to be a dependable ally. Possessing ineffective military forces inhibits a state's ability to assist prospective allies and renders a state less able to deter threats on its own. This exemplifies an instance where the trade-off between arms and allies does not apply. Using new data on the military recruitment policies of states since 1816, we find that adopting a conscription-based recruitment system in the previous five years makes a state more likely to form an alliance in the current year, even when accounting for a heightened threat environment.

This paper accomplishes two related goals. Firstly, it presents version 1.1 of the Interstate War Data (IWD) data set. IWD is a data set of all interstate wars, using Correlates of War (COW) rules but improving on COW by repairing the high number of coding errors in COW and more accurately and precisely treating multilateral wars. IWD 1.1 makes important improvements over IWD 1.0, such as describing interstate wars and war participants previously neglected by COW and IWD 1.0 and extending the temporal range forward to 2013. It also is the first data set to provide a systematic list of all interstate wars back to 1816 with at least 500 battle deaths (COW and IWD 1.0 only listed those conflicts with at least 1000 battle deaths). Secondly, the paper discusses important issues in collecting data on interstate wars, especially collecting reliable data on battle dead. Battle dead data are critical both for constructing data sets and for testing hypotheses, but frequently battle dead estimates vary widely, and come from sources of varying quality. The paper discusses the importance of using reliable sources, and in particular of minimizing reliance on military encyclopedias.

We provide a new perspective on how domestic factors shape the prospects for international cooperation. Internal arms, specifically conscription, signal a willingness and suitability to be a dependable ally. Possessing ineffective military forces inhibits a state's ability to assist prospective allies and renders a state less able to deter threats on its own. This exemplifies an instance where the trade-off between arms and allies does not apply. Using new data on the military recruitment policies of states since 1816, we find that adopting a conscription-based recruitment system in the previous five years makes a state more likely to form an alliance in the current year, even when accounting for a heightened threat environment.

The Leader Experience and Attribute Descriptions (LEAD) data set provides a rich source of new information about the personal lives and experiences of over 2,000 state leaders from 1875-2004. For the first time, we can combine insights from psychology and human development with large-N data on interstate conflict for a new theory of leadership and interstate relations. The data set provides details about military experiences, childhood, education, personal and family life, and occupational history before leaders assumed power. The data are available in leader-year format and are compatible with existing tools for analysis such as EUGene (Bennett and Stam 2000). This research note discusses the motivation for the creation of the LEAD data set and discusses the coding decisions for most of the key variables. We provide a series of descriptive statistical illustrations of the data and illustrate the depth of the available information with cases from Latin American leaders, showing the durability of these personal experiences across space and time. (International Interactions (London)/ FUB)

Military leaders, policymakers, and academics have long debated the relative merits of volunteer versus conscript armies. They also have studied the possible effects of eroding resolve among mass publics in democratic states during wartime. In this paper, we use battlefield casualty data from the population of interstate wars to compare theories of property takings and domestic institutions. We find conscription, like other non-market-based property takings, to be a wasteful means of mobilizing military manpower. Volunteer armies suffer far fewer casualties than their conscripted counterparts. We also find that this effect compounds when interacted with regime type. Volunteer democratic armies suffer especially few casualties. Finally, we find that democratic societies are willing to bear the costs of large-scale commitments to maintaining state sovereignty and survival when targeted by authoritarian states, at times in the face of certain defeat. Adapted from the source document.