Suchergebnisse

Stephen Van Evera explicitly sets out to accomplish two
tasks. The first is to present a set of five hypotheses on the
causes of war grounded in "misperceptive fine-grained struc-
tural realism" (p. 11). He lists (1) false optimism about the
outcome of a future war, (2) perceived first-mover advan-
tages, (3) opening and closing windows of opportunity and
vulnerability, (4) cumulativity of resources, and (5) beliefs
about the offense-defense balance. He then develops 23
related hypotheses. The second task is to test some of the
major hypotheses (the second, third, and fifth) against a small
set of cases. He succeeds at the first task but is not so
successful at the latter. He also briefly speculates on the
effects of the "nuclear revolution."

Why do democracies win wars? This is a critical question in the study of international relations, as a traditional view--expressed most famously by Alexis de Tocqueville--has been that democracies are inferior in crafting foreign policy and fighting wars. In Democracies at War, the first major study of its kind, Dan Reiter and Allan Stam come to a very different conclusion. Democracies tend to win the wars they fight--specifically, about eighty percent of the time. Complementing their wide-ranging case-study analysis, the authors apply innovative statistical tests and new hypot

Why do democracies win wars? This is a critical question in the study of international relations, as a traditional view--expressed most famously by Alexis de Tocqueville--has been that democracies are inferior in crafting foreign policy and fighting wars. In Democracies at War, the first major study of its kind, Dan Reiter and Allan Stam come to a very different conclusion. Democracies tend to win the wars they fight--specifically, about eighty percent of the time.

Mark Fey and Kristopher Ramsay (2006) take issue with the presentation of how players' beliefs diverge in "Bargaining and the Nature of War" (Smith and Stam 2004). In that article, the authors constructed a model of bargaining between two nations in which the nations have noncommon priors about the probability with which either nation would eventually prevail, should a war between them continue to a decisive conclusion. The players' divergent beliefs make up one of the fundamental potential causes of war in the model. Fey and Ramsay argue that Smith and Stam's departure from the standard common priors assumption is an unnecessary deviation from convention. The authors disagree, arguing that their different approach to modeling disagreement between rational actors provides a useful way to approach the empirical puzzle they set out to explore, namely, how rational actors with divergent beliefs might settle their disagreements in the context of war.

A model of bargaining embedded within a random-walk model of warfare is developed. The conflict model contains aspects of both lottery-based and war-of-attrition models of conflict. Results show that future disputes are less likely to lead to armed conflict following long rather than short wars. Furthermore, should a subsequent dispute lead to armed conflict, the higher the cost and the longer the previous war, the shorter the conflict is likely to last.

A theory of sanction duration that focuses on differences between democratic and nondemocratic states in the structure of leaders' support coalitions is tested, using a hazard model to analyze a data set of 47 sanction events with 272 observations. Results show that leadership change strongly affects the duration of sanctions only in the case of nondemocratic states. Leadership change in democratic states is unrelated to the duration of sanctions; however, leadership change in nondemocratic sender and nondemocratic target states is strongly related to the ending of economic sanctions.