Suchergebnisse

Statisticians refer to discernible patterns of events that are nevertheless unrelated as a "hot hand." An observer watching a gambler on a winning streak may suspect that the game is fixed, but it is not necessary to depart from standard probability theory to account for series of low-probability events. Enduring rivalries research often uses frequency counts of militarized disputes to identify rivalries as "enduring." Nevertheless, discernible patterns in dispute data could be hot hands. Using the same datasets & definitions as the original researchers, we test the hypothesis that the number of enduring rivalries reported in the literature is significantly different from the number generated by a model in which disputes are randomly distributed. We compare the null model to existing definitions of enduring rivalry using a Poisson process. We find that we cannot reject the hypothesis that dispute series identified as enduring rivalries result from a stochastic process. 2 Tables, 1 Figure. Adapted from the source document.

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.