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The discussion focuses on the effects that changing forms of authoritarian rule and the growth of a bureaucratic state had on A gentine public policies during the 1930-1970 interval. Hitherto quite separate literatures are brought together in the examination of two different arguments. The first, drawn from the emerging literature on authoritarianism and corporatism in Latin America, suggests that the trends in Argentine public policies should have been interrupted whenever different types of authoritarian coalitions sequentially replaced each other in power. The second thesis, drawn primarily from research on Latin American bureaucracies and North American policy analyses, suggests that there is a need to disaggregate the coalition/policy linkage. It hypothesizes that four factors which developed at about the midpoint of the 1930-1970 period in Argentina—the growth of a large and well-entrenched public sector, limitations on the ability of political elites to press their policy demands, limitations on previously uncommitted resources, and the existence of a crisis of hegemony—should have increasingly constrained the policy-making importance of the coalitions and the leaders who represented them in the highest levels of government. Coalitions and elites should have been increasingly unable to direct and indirect policies in the ways which they preferred. Interrupted time-series analyses of seven policy series provided support for the constraints thesis. Coalitions and those who governed at the top were once important in Argentina as the authoritarian literature suggests. Coalition changes did not occur in a vacuum, however. Once the four state-related constraints developed, such shifts came to have only marginal impacts on the examined policy indicators.

Through the use of logic, simulation, and empirical data, Benjamin A. Most and Harvey Starr develop and demonstrate a nuanced and more appropriate conceptualization of explanation in international relations and foreign policy in Inquiry, Logic, and International Politics. They demonstrate that a concern with the logical underpinnings of research raises a series of theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological issues that must be addressed if theory and research design are to meet the challenges of cumulation in the study of international relations (or any area of social science). The authors argue for understanding the critical, yet subtle, interplay of the elements with a research triad composed of theory, logic, and method.

This discussion attempts to explore the concepts of diffusion and contagion as well as the nature of diffusion/contagion effects, and to suggest how they might operate. Using a series of logical analyses to continue the exercise of unpacking the concept of diffusion, which was initially presented in Most and Starr (1980), we are led to the conclusion that such processes are both less mystical and troublesome than they have often appeared in the literature. We argue that spatial diffusion processes may be disaggregated. Rather than being unique, diffusion/contagion processes may be seen as one subfield of `linkage' politics; with direct diffusion relationships as specialized extra-societal (general linkage) phenomena.

As part of an ongoing project, we have investigated the existence of conflict diffusion in the post-World War II international system. The initial systemwide tests of our Warring Border Nation model of positive spatial diffusion were replicated successfully in a study of conflict in the African region that appeared in this journal. Although both the systemwide and African regional studies demonstrated the existence of conflict diffusion, the present article begins to specify exactly which processes are operative by unpacking the earlier results and their attendant methodologies. To describe what positive spatial diffusion looks like in Africa—the states for which it holds and the conditions under which it does so—we present a series of analyses that exclusively utilize the variables that are central to the argument: borders, types of borders, and factors related to the "treatment" of having a Warring Border Nation.

Two logical problems appear to have impeded the development of an integrative understanding of international and foreign policy phenomena. The first has to do with the potential for foreign policy substitutability: through time and across space, similar factors could plausibly be expected to trigger different foreign policy acts. The second concerns the potential existence of "sometimes true," domain-specific laws. It is the logical opposite of the substitution problem, suggesting that different processes could plausibly be expected to lead to similar results. Neither problem appears to be well understood in the current literature; if anything, both are ignored. Nevertheless, they are potentially important. Together, they suggest that scholars who are interested in developing a cumulative base of integrative knowledge about foreign policy and international relations phenomena need to rethink both their focus on middle-range theory and their application of the standard approaches. We recommend reconsideration of some of the "grand" theoretical approaches found in the "traditional" literature. A new synthesis of tradition and science and of grand, middle, and narrow approaches appears to be needed. Finally, in contrast to the arguments of proponents of a systems-level approach, we argue that the most fruitful avenues for theorizing and research are at the microlevel in which the focus is on decision making, expected utility calculations, and foreign policy interaction processes.

In previous research the authors investigated the processes of war diffusion based on interaction opportunities as operationalized by interstate borders. Studies of international borders, the relationship between borders and the onset of war, and the operation of diffusion/contagion effects on bordering nations were undertaken for all nations in the international system during the 1946-1965 period. The purpose of this article is to replicate the results of the original analyses by focusing on one regional subsystem—Africa— during a different time period, 1960-1977, and using different war data sets. The present study successfully replicates the original: Borders are found to be dynamic, and the border-war hypothesis and the spatial diffusion expectations are confirmed for Africa in the later period.

The purpose of this discussion is to focus on two problems that appear to have hindered the development of a solution to what Zinnes (1978, 1980) has termed the "puzzle" regarding the war proneness of nations. Specifically, it suggests that scholars who are interested in understanding and explaining international conflict should recognize: (1) While many analysts have focused on factors internal to nations—"national attributes"—as possibly sufficient conditions for war, the existence of such relationships is logically precluded by the way in which analysts have defined wars. (2) While scholars are trained to search for generalizable patterns that hold both through time and across space and often seem to believe that the isolation of such associations is the sine qua non of the systematic analysis of international conflict, simple logic and already existing theory suggest that patterns of that variety may not in fact exist. While neither of these contentions is original or complex, it is argued that a general failure to understand or recognize such rather basic, logical problems has impeded the development of a base of verifiable, replicable, and generalizable knowledge about the causes of international conflict.