Political Irrelevance, Democracy, and the Limits of Militarized Conflict

Abstract

Although the statistical literature on conflict studies has generated strong and consistent findings on the relationship of political irrelevance and dyadic democracy to conflict, scholars have paid scant attention to the interesting theoretical issue of how they matter. The authors argue that additive controls and dropping irrelevant dyads constitute misspecifications of their effects. There are theoretical reasons to believe that the impact of distance on conflict is not sufficiently severe to justify the practice of simply dropping irrelevant dyads. Moreover, they argue that political irrelevance and dyadic democracy, rather than subtracting some constant quantity, interact to impose an upper bound on the probability of conflict initiation. They find both of these arguments to be supported in a reanalysis of a prominent study of dispute initiation.

Resolve in International Politics

“…6 If the situational and dispositional factors that predict resolve in the experimental analyses 6 The advantage of the Boolean approach is that it allows us to tractably employ an empirical model that corresponds to our interactive theory. As Braumoeller and Carson (2011) show, although it is possible to represent the Boolean logit functional form as a single logit with multiplicative interaction terms, doing so would require a sufficient number of interaction terms so as to render the model extremely difficult to interpret. also predict the probability of victory in great power military interventions, we can feel confident that resolve actually predicts conflict outcomes, using measures of resolve derived independently of the outcomes we are using them to explain.…”

“…I temporarily set aside the question of whether some of these theories are better expressed by a Boolean formulation rather than an interactive one(Braumoeller, 2003;Braumoeller and Carson, 2011), exploring this possibility in Chapter 5.…”

Flexible Causal Inference for Political Science

“…Carrubba, Yuen and Zorn 2007), selection bias (Sartori, 2003;von Stein, 2005;Boehmke, Morey and Shannon, 2006;Chiba, Martin and Stevenson, 2014), split-population or partial-observability models (Xiang, 2010;Braumoeller and Carson, 2011), zero-inflated or rare events data (King and Zeng, 2001;Bagozzi, Hill, Moore and Mukherjee, 2015), network analysis (Dorussen and Ward, 2008;Hafner-Burton and Kahler, 2009;Maoz, 2009;Cranmer, Desmarais and Menninga, 2012), and more.…”

An Interactive Model of the Democratic Peace: Revisiting the Theory with Elastic Measures

“…Although we agree that some dyads have a much lower probability of militarized conflict, the selection of 'relevant dyads' involves arbitrary decisions without a solid theoretical base. Braumoeller & Carson (2011) are critical of controlling for the political relevance of the dyad, arguing that it eliminates much of the likelihood of conflict, and, for the reasons they state, our work considers all dyads, including those that, due to their distance from each other and their material capacities, have a low (or null) probability of conflict among themselves. This issue has been addressed by Beck et al (2000) and also King & Zeng (2001), who address the statistical implications of including or not including these observations.…”