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I propose an audience costs game with considerations added from selectorate theory. We see that winning coalition and selectorate size have competing effects on conflict choices in an audience costs setting. Large coalition regimes face lower audience costs than non-democracies, making it harder for them to commit to war. But larger selectorates increase the value of office, making conflict escalation more attractive. Coalition effects dominate when interacted with selectorate size. Evidence from 1816–2014 supports the game's implications. The results indicate that both threat initiation and dispute resolution are better predicted by focusing on domestic, leader-specific variables.

A new forecasting model, solved for Bayesian Perfect Equilibria, is introduced. It, along with several alternative models, is tested on data from the European Union. The new model, which allows for contingent forecasts and for generating confidence intervals around predictions, outperforms competing models in most tests despite the absence of variance on a critical variable in all but nine cases. The more proximate the political setting of the issues is to the new model's underlying theory of competitive and potentially coercive politics, the better the new model does relative to other models tested in the European Union context. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Sage Publications Ltd.]

Philip E. Tetlock and I agree that forecasting tools are best evaluated in peer-reviewed settings and in comparison not only to expert judgments, but also to alternative modeling strategies. Applying his suggested standards of assessment, however, certain forecasting models not only outperform expert judgments, but also have gone head-to-head with alternative models and outperformed them. This track record demonstrates the capability to make significant, reliable predictions of difficult, complex events. The record has unfolded, contrary to Tetlock's contention, not only in government and business applications, but also in numerous peer-reviewed publications containing hundreds of real-time forecasts. Moreover, reliable prediction is achieved while avoiding significant false-positive or false-negative rates. Adapted from the source document.

Comparative tests of predictive accuracy across models are exceptionally rare in political science. The collection of articles in this issue provides a rigorous, systematic evaluation of alternative models for explaining and predicting decision-making within the European Union. I examine how alternative models were evaluated and raise questions about the differences in the extent to which the operational definitions of variables match contending theoretical approaches. I also raise questions regarding the difference between models with regard to whether the issues are part of a repeated game or a single-shot game. Finally, I propose future tests to hone in on some of the puzzles raised by the findings reported here.

Although it is generally believed that the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 was the beginning of the international system of nation-states, the author argues that the system began with the competition between the Holy Roman Empire & the kings of France & England. This led to the 1122 Concordat of Worms. To make this point, the author reviews the treaty of Westphalia that affirmed the elements of sovereignty & explores how these elements were part of the competition between the Catholic church & kings in the appointment of bishops. The Investiture Struggle ended with the establishment of property rights that fit with sovereign territory & placed the kings in a new trusteeship role in that territory. With the right to property came a new competition that brought growth & new political institutions. The Concordat of Worms gave kings the right to income from their territories, which were defined as areas under each bishop. This became the formation of the territorially based state system. The terms at Westphalia that defined the sovereign authority of the state were only a significant development in the process that had started five centuries before. 35 References. L. A. Hoffman

Gaddis claimed that international relations theory failed to predict the Gulf War, the Soviet Union's collapse, and the cold war's end. Subsequently, he acknowledged that the expected utility model captures the logic behind complex adaptive systems such as the cold war international system. That model correctly predicted two of the events to which Gaddis pointed. Here, that model is used to simulate alternative scenarios to determine whether the cold war's end could have been predicted based only on information available in 1948. The simulations show a 68% to 78% probability that the United States would win the cold war peacefully given the conditions in 1948 and plausible shifts in the attentiveness of each state to security concerns over time. The analysis demonstrates a rigorous method for testing counterfactual histories and shows that the pro-American end to the cold war was an emergent property of the initial post-World War II conditions.