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"Technological determinism" is predominantly employed as a critic's term, used to dismiss certain classes of theoretical and empirical claims. Understood more productively as referring to claims that place a greater emphasis on the autonomous and social-shaping tendencies of technology, technological determinism is a valuable and prominent perspective. This article will advance our understanding of technological determinism through four contributions. First, I clarify some debates about technological determinism through an examination of the meaning of technology. Second, I parse the family of claims related to technological determinism. Third, I note that constructivist and determinist insights may each be valid given particular scope conditions, the most prominent of which is the scale of analysis. Finally, I propose a theoretical microfoundation for technological determinism— military–economic adaptationism—in which economic and military competition constrain sociotechnical evolution to deterministic paths. This theory is a special case of a general theory—sociotechnical selectionism—which can be regarded as also including (mild) constructivist theories as special cases. Greater understanding of, respect for, and engagement with technological determinism will enhance the study of technology and our ability to shape our sociotechnical systems.

In April 2013, a controversy arose when a working paper (Herndon, Ash, and Pollin 2013) claimed to show serious errors in a highly cited and influential economics paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (2010). The Reinhart and Rogoff paper had come to serve as authoritative evidence in elite conversations (Krugman 2013) that high levels of debt, especially above the '90 percent [debt/GDP] threshold' (Reinhart and Rogoff 2010, 577), posed a risk to economic growth. Much of the coverage of this controversy focused on an error that was a 'perfect made-for-TV mistake' (Stevenson and Wolfers 2013) involving a simple error in the formula used in their Excel calculations. The real story here, however, is that it took three years for this error and other issues to be discovered because replication files were not publicly available, nor were they provided to scholars when asked. If professional norms or the American Economic Review had required that authors publish replication files, this debate would be advanced by three years and discussions about austerity policies would have been based on a more clear-sighted appraisal of the evidence. Adapted from the source document.

In April 2013, a controversy arose when a working paper (Herndon, Ash, and Pollin 2013) claimed to show serious errors in a highly cited and influential economics paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (2010). The Reinhart and Rogoff paper had come to serve as authoritative evidence in elite conversations (Krugman 2013) that high levels of debt, especially above the "90 percent [debt/GDP] threshold" (Reinhart and Rogoff 2010, 577), posed a risk to economic growth. Much of the coverage of this controversy focused on an error that was a "perfect made-for-TV mistake" (Stevenson and Wolfers 2013) involving a simple error in the formula used in their Excel calculations. The real story here, however, is that it took three years for this error and other issues to be discovered because replication files were not publicly available, nor were they provided to scholars when asked. If professional norms or theAmerican Economic Reviewhad required that authors publish replication files, this debate would be advanced by three years and discussions about austerity policies would have been based on a more clear-sighted appraisal of the evidence.

Leaders throughout history have been concerned--often obsessed--with how other leaders perceive them. Historians have argued that many wars have been fought for purposes of reputation, honor, status, and prestige. However, there is little systematic study of these phenomena, and specifically of the effects of concern for reputation for resolve on interstate conflict behavior. After precisely defining resolve, and reputation for resolve, this dissertation examines this question by developing a family of formal models of escalation and reputation-engagement. From these models I explicitly deduce four testable implications of variation in concern for reputation for resolve that take selection effects into account and are robust to a variety of assumptions.To test these implications I search for research designs where concern for reputation is manipulated in a manner that is reasonably well-understood, and in which large unknown biases are unlikely. I find two such designs. The first, analyzed in collaboration with Devin Caughey, compares U.S. conflict behavior depending on whether the president is from the U.S. South. The U.S. South has a "culture of honor" that places greater importance on an individual's reputation for resolve. Using permutation inference and NPC, a technique new to political science, to provide a joint statistical test of the predictions, we find that conflict behavior under Southern presidents is substantially and significantly different from non-Southern presidents in a manner predicted by my theory. Furthermore, this difference remains significant under a large number of matched comparisons. This result is unlikely to be spurious because of its robustness to conditioning and because of theoretical and empirical inconsistencies in the alternative accounts.The second research design compares the conflict behavior of leaders early in their time- in-office with those same leaders later in their time-in-office. Leaders at the start of their tenure, as compared with themselves later in their career, should care more about their reputations because they have less developed reputations and longer time horizons. Each prediction of my theory is examined and finds statistically significant support with relatively large effect sizes. Alternative potential explanations are systematically ruled out through critical tests. In summary, the results from a set of clear tests of the effect of concern for reputation are consistent with the strongest claims made in the literature: concern for reputation seems to be an extremely important cause of war.

AbstractMajor theories of military innovation focus on relatively narrow technological developments, such as nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers. Arguably the most profound military implications of technological change, however, come from more fundamental advances arising from 'general-purpose technologies' (GPTs), such as the steam engine, electricity, and the computer. Building from scholarship on GPTs and economic growth, we argue that the effects of GPTs on military effectiveness are broad, delayed, and shaped by indirect productivity spillovers. We label this impact pathway a 'general-purpose military transformation' (GMT). Contrary to studies that predict GPTs will rapidly diffuse to militaries around the world and narrow gaps in capabilities, we show that GMTs can reinforce existing balances if leading militaries have stronger linkages to a robust industrial base in the GPT than challengers. Evidence from electricity's impact on military affairs, covering the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, supports our propositions about GMTs. To probe the explanatory value of our theory and account for alternative interpretations, we compare findings from the electricity case to the military impacts of submarine technology, a non-GPT that emerged in the same period. Finally, we apply our findings to contemporary debates about artificial intelligence, which could plausibly cause a profound GMT.

Reputation has long been considered central to international relations, but unobservability, strategic selection, and endogeneity have handicapped quantitative research. A rare source of haphazard variation in the cultural origins of leaders-the fact that one-third of US presidents were raised in the American South, a well-studied example of a culture of honor-provides an opportunity to identify the effects of heightened concern for reputation for resolve. A formal theory that yields several testable predictions while accounting for unobserved selection into disputes is offered. The theory is illustrated through a comparison of presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and systematically tested using matching, permutation inference, and the nonparametric combination of tests. Interstate conflicts under Southern presidents are shown to be twice as likely to involve uses of force, last on average twice as long, and are three times more likely to end in victory for the United States than disputes under non-Southern presidents. Other characteristics of Southern presidencies do not seem able to account for this pattern of results. Theresults provide evidence that concern for reputation is an important cause of interstate conflict behavior.