The Severity of Interstate Disputes

Abstract

Two fundamentalar guments are presented to answer whether dyadic balances or preponderances of military capability are more peaceful. First, the impact of the dyadic balance of military capabilities on interstate conflict, conditional on the level of dyadic interest similarity, is assessed. Many theoreticalworks in the field argue that the degree of interest similarity gives meaning to the balance of military forces, yet few empirical studies investigate the conditionality of these two variables. The second argument is that interstate conflict is a heterogeneous outcome. Aselection model that seeks to explain the severity of interstate disputes is used to address this concern. Using data from all interstate dyads between 1886 and 1992, results show that dyads with similar interests have less severe disputes, and under the condition of interest dissimilarity, balances rather than preponderances of military capability are associated with less severe disputes.

Estimating Dynamic State Preferences from United Nations Voting Data

“…Many papers use UN-based preference measures as independent variables. These include analyses of whether foreign policy interests affect the likelihood of interstate disputes (e.g., Gartzke 1998; Oneal and Russett 1999; Reed et al 2008), the severity of those disputes (Sweeney 2003), the occurrence of acts of terrorism (Dreher and Gassebner 2008), the distribution of foreign aid (e.g., Alesina and Dollar 2000), the lending behavior of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF, e.g., Thacker 1999; Dreher and Jensen 2007), the probability of signing treaties (Koremenos 2005), and the reception of diplomatic missions (Neumayer 2008).…”

Promoção de democracia e apoio a governos autoritários pelos Estados Unidos : transições de regime e realinhamentos de política externa no Irã e no Egito

“…O argumento dos autores é que esse efeito, por sua vez, depende da distribuição de benefícios ex ante. Um modelo é construído baseado nos votos na AGNU sob a suposição de que a diferença entre as preferências de dois Estados revela a mesma diferença das percepções daqueles Estados sobre a distribuição de benefícios.108 SWEENEY, 2003. O autor desenvolve um modelo explicativo para deter minar a gravidade de disputas interestatais usando dados de afinidade de votação de países, chegando à conclusão quase óbvia de que aqueles com mais interesses compartilhados têm disputas menos violentas.…”