In international politics, states learn from the behavior of other nations, including the reputations states form through their actions in the international system. This article presents a model of how states process this information and examines how this learning affects international conflict. The model builds off of cognitive balance theory and foreign policy learning models and breaks new ground in its ability to provide a contextual assessment of reputation in world politics. The article then investigates whether a dyad is more likely to experience conflict if at least one state has a reputation for hostility. This hypothesis is tested empirically across all dyads in the international system from 1817 to 2000. The results indicate that states do engage in this learning behavior and that the information generated by extra-dyadic interaction of states has a significant bearing upon the likelihood of dyadic conflict.
We develop and test a theory of the supply side of third party conflict management. Building on an existing formal model of mediation (Kydd 2003), we consider several factors that increase the pool of potential neutral mediators and the frequency of mediators' efforts to manage interstate conflicts. First, we argue that democratic mediators face greater audience costs for deception in the conflict management process because the media in democratic states is more likely to uncover attempts by democratic mediators to provide false information. Second, we argue that information in the global mediation marketplace becomes more accurate as the international system becomes more democratic because there is a wider network of vigilant free presses, which increases the costs of deception for potential mediators. Third, as disputants' ties to international organizations increase, this also raises the costs that mediators incur for dishonesty in the conflict management process because these institutions provide more frequent and accurate information about the disputants' capabilities and resolve. Empirical analyses of data on contentious issues (1816-2001) provide support for our theory, with third party conflict management occurring more frequently if a potential mediator is a democracy, and as the average global democracy level and the number of shared IO memberships between disputants rises. We also find that powerful states serve as mediators more often, and that trade ties, alliances, issue salience, and distance influence third party decisions to mediate.
This article examines the question of whether economic interdependence constrains or motivates interstate conflict. The theoretical model predicts when and how interdependence influences conflict, using exit costs to separate economic interdependence from less binding economic interaction. Analysis of the model suggests that when exit costs exceed an endurance threshold for at least one state, the threat of exit becomes a viable but limited bargaining tool. Exceeding this threshold increases low-level conflict as states use economic and diplomatic tools to resolve demands, but it decreases high-level conflict because states take advantage of more efficient means of dispute resolution. If the stakes are too high, however, exit costs fail to check conflict, and the economic relationship becomes an ineffective bargaining arena. Empirical analysis provides support for the hypotheses derived from the model. Does economic interdependence lead to peace or conflict between nations?When two countries enter an economic relationship characterized by interdependence, are they constrained in their military behavior, or are they adding one more source of discord? Such questions have been of interest to scholars for centuries, motivated by the hope that economic interdependence will help to extinguish interstate conflict and the fear that it will result in one more reason for states to fight one another. The topic is equally important to the policy world: as globalization continues to pervade the international arena, policy makers grapple with the political ramifications of their cross-national economic ties. Scholarly attention has repeatedly focused on this debate, and in response to Levy's (1989) call for research, the last decade has produced a "burgeoning empirical literature" on the subject (Mansfield and Pollins 2001, 834).Despite this recent attention, answers to these questions remain elusive. In current research, economic exchange is hypothesized to affect political conflict in one of three ways. One perspective argues that economic exchange leads to a
Crescenzi, Mark J.C. et al. (2012) Reliability, Reputation, and Alliance Formation. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/j.1468‐2478.2011.00711.x © 2012 International Studies Association In this paper, we examine how the past alliance behavior of nations affects the likelihood that these states will be involved in alliance formation. We contend that nations evaluate the reputations of potential allies when searching for alliance partners. Reputation information is processed by governments along with other immediate concerns. By introducing a model and developing subsequent measures of reputational alliance histories, we improve upon our current understanding of the factors that drive alliance formation. Using alliance reputation data derived from the ATOP project (1816–2000), we find support for the hypothesis that a reputation for upholding one's agreements significantly improves the likelihood of membership in future alliances.
Over time, states form relationships. These relationships, mosaics of past interactions, provide political leaders with information about how states are likely to behave in the future. Although intuitive, this claim holds important implications for the manner in which we construct and evaluate empirically our expectations about interstate behavior. Empirical analyses of interstate relations implicitly assume that the units of analysis are independent. Theories of interstate interaction are often cast in the absence of historical context. In the following article we construct a dynamic model of interstate interaction that we believe will assist scholars in empirical and theoretical studies by incorporating a substantively interpretable historical component into their models of interstate relations. Our conceptual model includes both conflictual and cooperative components, and exhibits the basic properties of growth and decay that characterize dyadic relationships. In an empirical exposition, we derive a continuous measure of interstate conflict from the conflictual component of the model. We rely on Oneal and Russett's (1997) analysis of dyadic conflict for the period 1950-85 as a benchmark, and examine whether the inclusion of our measure of interstate conflict significantly improves our ability to predict militarized conflict. We find empirical support for this hypothesis, indicating that our continuous measure of interstate conflict significantly augments a well-known statistical model of dyadic militarized conflict.Our findings reinforce the assertion that historical processes in interstate relationships represent substantively important elements in models of interstate behavior rather than econometric nuisances.
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