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Does the nature of a nation's political institutions influence the types of countries with which it allies? Some previous research has suggested that democracies tend to ally with other democracies. This study reexamines alliance patterns by assessing the broader linkage between regime type and alliance partnership. The authors present a refinement of previous research designs, using new data from Polity III and the updated correlates of war (COW) alliance data sets to analyze all alliances from 1815 to 1992. The bipolar alliance structures of the cold war (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) appear to be aberrations in their strong ideological content. In general, there is very little correlation between alliance dyads and regime type. Surprisingly, democracies are less likely to ally with one another than highly autocratic regimes. Regimes of most types seem to prefer to ally with partners of dissimilar type. The authors conclude that this is due to so-called gains from trade within alliance dyads.

Network theory and methods are becoming increasingly used to study the causes and consequences of conflict. Network analysis allows researchers to develop a better understanding of the causal dynamics and structural geometry of the complex web of interdependencies at work in the onset, incidence, and diffusion of conflict and peace. This issue features new theoretical and empirical research demonstrating how properly accounting for networked interdependencies has profound implications for our understanding of the processes thought to be responsible for the conflict behavior of state and non-state actors. The contributors examine the variation in networks of states and transnational actors to explain outcomes related to international conflict and peace. They highlight how networked interdependencies affect conflict and cooperation in a broad range of areas at the center of international relations scholarship. It is helpful to distinguish between three uses of networks, namely: (1) as theoretical tools, (2) as measurement tools, and (3) as inferential tools. The introduction discusses each of these uses and shows how the contributions rely on one or several of them. Next, Monte Carlo simulations are used to illustrate one of the strengths of network analysis, namely that it helps researchers avoid biased inferences when the data generating process underlying the observed data contains extradyadic interdependencies.

A basic debate in world politics involves the impact of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) on international conflict. Liberals, functionalists, and others see IGOs as capable of transforming global anarchy, while realists emphasize the essential irrelevance of IGOs in managing such fundamental processes as war and peace. Recent quantitative studies also yield disparate conclusions depending on particular econometric assumptions, implying variously that IGOs foster pacific relations among states, have no impact on dispute behavior, or even increase dispute propensity. At least part of the problem is a lack of theoretical and empirical specificity. The authors apply bargaining theory to develop a "middle path" between the realist and liberal perspectives. Only some IGOs, those with security mandates and the most sophisticated institutional structures, are likely to influence dispute behavior. The authors combine the theory with two improvements in research design. First, IGOs vary in capability, mandate, and cohesion. The authors construct a dataset of IGO institutional heterogeneity and member cohesiveness. Second, states join IGOs for reasons that are not unrelated to why states fight. The authors control for the level of international involvement among countries and find support for their arguments in initial tests.

Forschungen scheinen die liberale Überzeugung, Handel fördere den Frieden, zu untermauern. Jedoch ist das Verständnis der Verbindungen zwischen Konflikten und internationalen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen in mindestens zweierlei Hinsicht beschränkt. Erstens umfassen grenzüberschreitende wirtschaftliche Beziehungen weit mehr als nur den Aussenhandel. Globale Kapitalmärkte übertreffen den Austausch von Gütern und Dienstleistungen bei weitem und Staaten Koordinieren ihre Geldpolitiken in unterschiedlichem Ausmass. Zweitens ist die Art undWeise, in der Wirtschaftsbeziehungen Konfliktverhalten bremsen soll, im Licht neuerer analytischer Einsichten hinsichtlich der Kriegsursachen unplausibel. Die Autoren diskutieren und zeigen formal, wie Interdependenz den Rückgriff von Staaten auf militärische Gewalt beeinflussen kann. Das Risiko, wirtschaftliche Beziehungen, insbesondere den Zugang zu Kapital, zu unterbrechen, mag gelegentlich von kleineren Konflikten zwischen interdependenten Staaten abschrecken, jedoch wird diese Form der Opportunitätskosten typischerweise dabei versagen, militarisierte Auseinandersetzungen zu unterbinden. Stattdessen bietet die Interdependenz nichtmilitärische Möglichkeiten, Entschlossenheit durch kostenintensive Signale zu kommunizieren. Quantitative Ergebnisse zeigen, dass kapitalbezogene Interdependenz zum Frieden unabhängig von den Effekten anderer Variablen beiträgt. (SWP-Jns)

Research appears to substantiate the liberal conviction that trade fosters global peace. Still, existing understanding of linkages between conflict and international economics is limited in at least two ways. First, cross-border economic relationships are far broader than just trade. Global capital markets dwarf the exchange of goods and services, and states engage in varying degrees of monetary policy coordination. Second, the manner in which economics is said to inhibit conflict behavior is implausible in light of new analytical insights about the causes of war. We discuss, and then demonstrate formally, how interdependence can influence states' recourse to military violence. The risk of disrupting economic linkages—particularly access to capital—may occasionally deter minor contests between interdependent states, but such opportunity costs will typically fail to preclude militarized disputes. Instead, interdependence offers nonmilitarized avenues for communicating resolve through costly signaling. Our quantitative results show that capital interdependence contributes to peace independent of the effects of trade, democracy, interest, and other variables.

Does treatment abstraction affect treatment effects in International Relations survey experiments in countries outside of the US? We assess whether treatment effects are conditional on the anonymity of country actors among respondents in Brazil, China, Sweden, Japan, and Ukraine. We examine whether the effects of the United Nations' approval of military force and regime type of the target country on support for war are moderated by respondents' compliance with our abstraction encouragement. We find that around 20% of the respondents across all samples think of specific countries and do not comply with our abstraction encouragement. However, we fail to find evidence of a change in the average treatment effects by non-compliance, implying that the treatment effects are not likely to be conditional on respondents' compliance (thinking of specific cases) or schema inconsistency (thinking of specific cases that are implausible given the context). At the same time, we find that treatment inconsistency (thinking of specific cases that are inconsistent with the assigned treatments) can affect the main treatment effects.