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In Only the Dead, Bear Braumoeller assesses the claim that armed conflict is in decline and finds it wanting. In the course of his assessment, he also develops a powerful explanation for trends in warfare over time. His central finding is that, although there has been a drop in the rate of international conflict following the end of the Cold War, that drop followed nearly two centuries of steady increases in the rate of conflict. Moreover, the rate of civil war onset has increased following the end of the Cold War, and extrastate wars (wars between states and non-state entities) have shown a recent resurgence. With regard to war intensity and severity, he has found no significant change since the end of the Napoleonic Wars - which represents a sharp rejoinder to Pinker's thesis. Just as importantly, he contends that the flaws in Pinker's argument flow from a fundamental weakness in this theory, which is really a monocausal story about a decline in the willingness to wage war. In contrast, Braumoeller's findings are in accord with systemic theories of international politics that emphasize Great Power conflict. He therefore traces how Great Power interactions produce world orders, which in combination with Great Power activity alter the calculations made by states as they contemplate the choice between a negotiated settlement and war. To buttress his argument, he looks at key episodes from each major historical era, all the while emphasizing how the Great Power system induces armed conflict.

"This is the first book to describe and test a fully systemic theory of international politics. Using statistics and diplomatic history, it traces statesmen's efforts to influence the power and ideas that form the broad contours of the international system within which they interact"--

The various methodological techniques that fall under the umbrella description of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) are increasingly popular for modeling causal complexity and necessary or sufficient conditions in medium-N settings. Because QCA methods are not designed as statistical techniques, however, there is no way to assess the probability that the patterns they uncover are the result of chance. Moreover, the implications of the multiple hypothesis tests inherent in these techniques for the false positive rate of the results are not widely understood. This article fills both gaps by tailoring a simple permutation test to the needs of QCA users and adjusting the Type I error rate of the test to take into account the multiple hypothesis tests inherent in QCA. An empirical application–a reexamination of a study of protest-movement success in the Arab Spring–highlights the need for such a test by showing that even very strong QCA results may plausibly be the result of chance.

Drozdova and Gaubatz (2014) represent a welcome addition to the growing literature on quantitative methods designed to complement qualitative case studies. Partly due to its crossover nature, however, the article balances delicately-and ultimately untenably-between within-sample and out-of-sample inference. Moreover, isomorphisms with existing techniques, while validating the methodology, simultaneously raise questions regarding its comparative advantage. Adapted from the source document.

Systemic theories of international politics rarely predict conflict short of cataclysmic systemic wars, and dyadic theories of conflict lack systemic perspective. This article attempts to bridge the gap by introducing a two-step theory of conflict among Great Powers. In the first stage, states engage in a dynamic, ongoing process of managing the international system, which inevitably produces tensions among them. In the second stage, relative levels of security-related activity determine how and when those tensions erupt into disputes. A test of the theory on Great Power conflicts from the nineteenth century supports the argument and, moreover, favors the deterrence model over the spiral model as a proximate explanation of conflict in the second stage.

Political scientists overwhelmingly seek evidence of causation by measuring changes in the mean of the distribution of the dependent variable. This article points out that some causal relationships produce changes in thevariance, not the mean, of that distribution. It makes the case for variance-altering causation by demonstrating its empirical relevance to political scientists. The article also lays out an array of causal mechanisms—under the general headings of aggregation, contagion, and constraint—in order to demonstrate the logical coherence of variance-altering causation and the many ways in which it can arise. The discussion highlights the often-stringent empirical and logical requirements that must be met if the researcher hopes to make concrete predictions about changes in variance.

Theories that posit complex causation, or multiple causal paths, pervade the study of politics but have yet to find accurate statistical expression. To remedy this situation I derive new econometric procedures, Boolean probit and logit, based on the logic of complexity. The solution provides an answer to a puzzle in the rational deterrence literature: the divergence between theory and case-study findings, on the one hand, and the findings of quantitative studies, on the other, on the issue of the role of capabilities and willingness in the initiation of disputes. It also makes the case that different methodological traditions, rather than settling into "separate but equal" status, can instead inform and enrich one another.