Stuart Bremer often reminded us that third parties—directly or indirectly—affect the initiation, evolution, and termination of conflict. He encouraged scholars to research the phenomenon of joining behavior further and personally investigated it. Questions about joining behavior are indeed deeply intertwined with a variety of theories of conflict. However, existing records on third-party interventions are limited to states' military involvement in conflict. The limitations imposed by the data can lead researchers to biased or incomplete conclusions about many international phenomena. We heed Bremer's encouragement and present here the results of an effort to collect new evidence on nonneutral (partisan) interventions in militarized interstate disputes for the 1946—2001 period. The data we present differ from existing records in that: (1) they provide information on both third parties' military and nonmilitary activities; (2) they broaden the notion of what constitutes a third party by including coalitions of states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); (3) they expand the investigation framework by recording interventions that occur before and after a militarized dispute. We test the usefulness of the data by exploring the issue of major powers' interventions in conflicts, as Yamamoto and Bremer did in their 1980 “Wider Wars and Restless Nights” article. We offer strong support for Yamamoto and Bremer's finding that major powers drag one another into ongoing conflicts and show how the data may help us raise and answer new and more complex hypotheses about third parties and the dynamics of joining behavior.

The decision to intervene in ongoing conflicts is one of the most difficult foreign policy choices states often face. Yet, studies of third parties' joining behavior have been rare and limited in several respects. First, they have explored only a subset of all interventions-military interventions. Second, they have concentrated on security-based determinants of intervention-power and alliance considerations-while underplaying other possible motivations behind the decision to intervene. Third, they have explored intervention and alignment choices as separate issues. This paper proposes a model of joining behavior that includes both security considerations and homophilous network ties as determinants of third parties' intervention and alignment choices. The model is tested on military and nonmilitary interventions data from Corbetta and Dixon (2005) for the 1946-2001 period. The results from a boolean logit estimation indicate that (1) the intervention decision is the result of both security-driven, pragmatic considerations and homophily between joiners and disputants; and (2) opposition to a party in a conflict is as important as a third party's social proximity to the side being supported.

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A number of studies suggest that the gender of a legislator affects his or her congressional ideology. We argue that these studies may have produced misleading results because of insufficient controls for constituency influences. To better account for constituency effects, we use a longitudinal research design based on electoral turnover, which holds constituency constant while allowing gender and party to vary. We apply ordinary least squares regression to data from the 103d, 104th, and 105th Houses of Representatives and estimate the effect of gender turnover on changes in DW‐NOMINATE roll‐call voting scores. We find that, when we sufficiently control for both party and constituency influences, gender is not a determinant of the liberalness of a representative's roll‐call voting behavior.

In recent years (social) network approaches have been gaining ground in the field of international relations. Networks between states effectively explain patterns of international conflict and cooperation. One issue where conflict and cooperation converge-and where network analysis finds fruitful application-is the issue of third-party states' intervention in conflicts. This study investigates whether, and how, conflict expands in the international social space through the cooperative and antagonistic networks generated by states' supportive and oppositional interventions in international disputes. The study adopts a sociological theory of social units' interaction in the social space as a function of their multidimensional affinity to investigate further how such networks form. The hypotheses derived from this theoretical framework are tested using data on third-party non-neutral intervention in post-World War II militarized interstate disputes from Corbetta and Dixon (2005). Proximity in the international social space effectively predicts the creation of cooperative ties (supportive interventions) between states, while social distance predicts antagonistic ties (oppositional interventions).