Suchergebnisse

This case describes an effort to improve quantitative data on interstate wars. Specifically, the effort arose from three concerns about the very widely used Correlates of War data set on interstate wars. First, there are factual errors in the Correlates of War data set. Second, there are inconsistent applications of coding rules within the Correlates of War data. Third, the structure of the Correlates of War data set aggregated information in a manner that concealed important information and in some cases led to inappropriate empirical inferences. These factors led my coauthors and I to create a new data set on interstate wars, the Interstate War Data. That data set attempted to replicate the Correlates of War data, in the sense of using essentially the same coding rules as Correlates of War, albeit with more extensive historical research, more consistent applications of coding rules, and with slightly different structure to provide more information to users. The results of our efforts were quite surprising. We found an error (from flawed historical research or inconsistent application of coding rules) in the coding of at least one consequential variable (whether the conflict qualified as a war, who started the war, who participated in the war, and who won the war) in more than one third of Correlates of War interstate wars. We also found that the structure of how Correlates of War treated some wars, namely, aggregating very complicated multilateral conflicts such as World War II, omitted a tremendous amount of important information about war participation and outcomes. This project demonstrated the critical importance of investing time and energy in maximizing the quality of data.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Tables -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Learning in International Politics -- 3. Realism, Balance of Threat, and Alliances -- 4. Cases, Hypotheses, and Variables -- 5. Quantitative Results -- 6. Case Studies: Lessons Heeded -- 7. Case Studies: Lessons Not Learned? -- 8. Political Structure and Learning -- 9. Conclusion -- Select Bibliography -- Index

This book is the first work to build a conceptual framework describing how the pursuit of military effectiveness can present military and political tradeoffs, such as undermining political support for the war, creating new security threats, and that seeking to improve effectiveness in one aspect can reduce effectiveness in other aspects. Here are new ideas about military effectiveness, covering topics such as military robotics, nuclear weapons, insurgency, war finance, public opinion, and others. The study applies these ideas to World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the 1973 October War, as well as ongoing conflicts and public policy debates, such as the War on Terror, drone strikes, ISIS, Russian aggression against Ukraine, US-Chinese-Russian nuclear competitions, and the Philippines insurgency, among others. Both scholarly and policy-oriented readers will gather new insights into the political dimensions of military power, and the complexities of trying to grow military power

"Foreign-Imposed Regime Change" published on by Oxford University Press.

"Is Democracy a Cause of Peace?" published on by Oxford University Press.

This article considers whether political science should abandon the subfields of American politics, comparative politics, and international relations (IR), for new subfields of conflict, political economy, institutions, and behavior. The focus here is whether the field should abandon IR. The article lays out the arguments in favor of abandoning IR, describing scholarly trends that cross conventional subfield lines and are pushing to dissolve IR. Next, it argues that the costs of abandoning IR exceed the benefits, as new subfield divisions would remove some artificial walls but create new ones. Abandoning IR might undermine objective theory testing, would disadvantage the study of international system and structure, and would undermine the ability of political science to inform foreign policy debates. The article concludes by recommending that the field keep IR and its current subfield boundaries but that the walls between subfields should be kept low and porous.

This article considers whether political science should abandon the subfields of American politics, comparative politics, and international relations (IR), for new subfields of conflict, political economy, institutions, and behavior. The focus here is whether the field should abandon IR. The article lays out the arguments in favor of abandoning IR, describing scholarly trends that cross conventional subfield lines and are pushing to dissolve IR. Next, it argues that the costs of abandoning IR exceed the benefits, as new subfield divisions would remove some artificial walls but create new ones. Abandoning IR might undermine objective theory testing, would disadvantage the study of international system and structure, and would undermine the ability of political science to inform foreign policy debates. The article concludes by recommending that the field keep IR and its current subfield boundaries but that the walls between subfields should be kept low and porous. Adapted from the source document.

What explains the form of international alliances? Conventional wisdom forecasts that audience cost-averse states like democracies demand that their alliances include conditions, such as limitations to specific regions, to reduce the likelihood of paying the audience costs of treaty violation. This paper builds on the conventional wisdom by proposing that democracies are especially likely to demand that an alliance include conditions that make the treaty more incomplete, that is, make the compliance requirements more ambiguous, in comparison to including conditions that do not make the treaty more incomplete. Treaty incompleteness gives leaders another tool to reduce domestic political audience cost risks. Incompleteness makes it easier for a leader to argue to a domestic political audience that a wider array of actions, including actions such as nonintervention on behalf of an embattled ally that other signatories might view as noncompliant, is actually compliant, reducing domestic audience costs for these actions. Examining all international alliances since 1816 using seemingly unrelated regression, the paper finds empirical support for the theory: alliances with democracies are more likely to have conditions making the treaty more incomplete, but not more likely to have conditions that do not make the treaty more incomplete.

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.