Opportunity, Willingness, and the Diffusion of War

Using borders and alliances as indicators of opportunity and willingness, respectively, we test the relationship between the sea and the diffusion of war during the 1816-1965 period. The impact of borders and alliances, individually and in combination, on the growth of ongoing war through infectious diffusion is shown through the comparison of baseline cases to cases where states at peace were exposed to various treatments comprised of warring border nations or warring alliance partners. The findings indicate that the probability of war diffusion is substantially increased as opportunities and willingness increase, particularly when such geographic and political factors are combined. The applicability of the opportunity and willingness framework to the study of war and diffusion is expanded and confirmed

Trigger-happy? Military regimes and the timing of conflict

The proclivity of military regimes and their leaders for more frequent involvement in international conflict than other autocracies has been shown in several studies. The question raised here is not whether they participate in more conflicts and disputes, but rather whether after the leaders of military regimes enter office they initiate these acts more quickly than the leaders of other types of autocracies. Drawing on three authoritarian regime typologies and examining the time to the initiation of any dispute and the initiation of violent disputes, our results show that in comparison to other authoritarian leaders a subset of military leaders is distinctly trigger-happy

Demography, Democracy and Disputes: The Search for the Elusive Relationship Between Population Growth and International Conflict

AbstractWe examine the propensity of states to initiate international conflict conditioned on four primary explanatory variables: (1) changes in population over varying lags, (2) democratic status of the state, (3) the power status of the state, and (4) changes in the state's level of energy consumption. We hypothesize that the responsiveness of a government to the needs of its citizens is sufficiently important that the effect of population growth cannot be properly examined independently of democracy and that major powers tend to become involved in disputes for a much wider set of reasons than minor powers. Thus, we expect to find the strongest effect of population change on conflict initiation in democratic minor powers. We also expect that decreases in energy consumption concurrent with increases in population will lead to conflict initiation. A series of negative binomial regressions over 20 yearly time lags lends robust support to our expectations

Selection institutions and war aims

We explore how the sizes of the winning coalition and selectorate influence the war aims of states. Leaders who answer to a small winning coalition are more likely to seek territorial gain as a way to increase state resources. Nonterritorial war aims produce a commitment problem in that after the war the defeated state may not comply with the victor's demands. States with large winning coalitions are more willing to continue the war to remove the enemy leader as a solution to this commitment problem. We test our hypotheses against the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set, and we find some support for our argument.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47901/1/10101_2005_Article_108.pd

The Geography of the International System: The CShapes Dataset

We describe CShapes, a new dataset that provides historical maps of state boundaries and capitals in the post-World War II period. The dataset is coded according to both the Correlates of War and the Gleditsch and Ward (1999) state lists, and is therefore compatible with a great number of existing databases in the discipline. Provided in a geographic data format, CShapes can be used directly with standard GIS software, allowing a wide range of spatial computations. In addition, we supply a CShapes package for the R statistical toolkit. This package enables researchers without GIS skills to perform various useful operations on the GIS maps. The paper introduces the CShapes dataset and structure and gives three examples of how to use CShapes in political science research. First, we show how results from quantitative analysis can be depicted intuitively as a map. The second application gives an example of computing indicators on the CShapes maps, which can then be used in statistical tests. Third, we illustrate the use of CShapes for generating different weights matrices in spatial statistical applications. All the examples can be replicated using the freely available R package and do not require specialized GIS skills. The dataset is available for download from the CShapes website (http://nils.weidmann.ws/projects/cshapes). © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC