Alliances, Internal Information, and Military Conflict Among Member-States

Abstract

We offer a theory explaining how alliances as international security regimes reduce military conflict between member-states through their internal provision of information concerning national military capabilities+ Bargaining models of war have shown that a lack of information about relative military capabilities functions as an important cause of war+ We argue that alliances provide such information to internal participants, and greater knowledge within the alliance about memberstate military capabilities reduces certain informational problems that could potentially lead to war+ This internal information effect, however, is a conditional one+ We posit that the information provided within the alliance matters most for dyads at or near power parity: the cases where states are most uncertain about who would prevail if a military conflict did emerge+ In power preponderant dyads where the outcome of a potential military conflict is relatively certain, the internal information provided by military alliances becomes less important+ Our statistical results provide strong support for these theoretical arguments+ In what is perhaps the largest research program in the discipline of international relations, scholars continue to explore the determinants of war and interstate military conflict+ Quantitative models in this research program commonly use a dyadyear unit of analysis and almost always include a variable for joint alliance membership+ Indeed, this variable represents a key part of what has become the "standard model" of interstate military conflict, 1 following Oneal and Russett's seminal paper on the subject+ 2 Our greatest thanks go to Ashley Leeds, who made available an advance copy of the ATOP 3+0 data set+ This article also benefited from presentations at the University of Wisconsin and at ISA-South in Columbia, S+C+ Finally, we thank Lisa Martin, two anonymous reviewers,

Flexible Causal Inference for Political Science

“…Similarly, military alliances are widely accepted as a tool that can reduce the risk of conflict (Leeds, 2003;Johnson and Leeds, 2011;Benson, 2011;Fang, Johnson and Leeds, 2014), but both alliance formation and conflicts are driven by the (typically unobserved) interests and security environment of the states involved. Failing to account for these interests leads to bias in the estimation of the impact of alliances on conflict (Levy, 1981;Bearce, Flanagan and Floros, 2006). In the same vein, poor economic conditions are thought to increase the risk of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess and Weerapana, 2004;Freytag, Krüger, Meierrieks and Schneider, 2011;Meierrieks and Gries, 2012), but important variables such as political freedom affect both the state of the economy and the incidence of terrorism (Grier and Tullock, 1989;Krieger and Meierrieks, 2011).…”

Information alliances in contests with budget limits

“…Whether or not alliances allow for pooling of alliance members'e¤orts depends on the institutional framework. 8 Some types of information spillovers between bidders have been considered in standard auctions.…”

“…7 Our analysis focuses on a di¤erent aspect of alliance formation and reveals information exchange to be a potentially important information incentive for alliance formation. 8 The formal framework and the Bayesian Nash equilibrium are described in section 2. This section also discusses why the analysis is limited to the case in which the budget limitations are severe.…”

Strategic Aspects of Fighting in Alliances

“…(Bunselmeyer, 1975, p. 15). 4 For the Second World War: "The fact that victory was finally in sight in 1944 thus had a double and contradictory effect on the alliance. On the one hand, the removal of mortal danger made them less inclined to subordinate individual aims to the need for hanging together and hence a greater willingness to disregard the susceptibilities of allies.…”