Major Power Interstate Conflict in the Post-World War II Era: An Increase, a Decrease, or No Change?

The second World War is often regarded as a watershed in world history. Observers have pointed to a number of changes in the global system that occurred after its conclusion: the emergence of bipolar system structure, along with new contenders for international leadership; the invention (and subsequent proliferation)of weapons of extreme power; and the explosion of new nation-states has created a truly global system. But have these changes been accompanied by changes in behavior between nation states? This paper will investigate one aspect of interstate behavior--military conflict involving the major powers--and ascertain whether the time period 1946-1976 was marked by a sharp change in the amount of this conflict, as compared to the period 1816-1945

The Acceptability of War and Support for Defense Spending: Evidence from Fourteen Democracies, 2004–2013

We study the factors that influence citizen support for defense spending in fourteen democracies over the period 2004–2013. We pose two research questions. First, what factors influence citizen support for war and military force? We refer to this as the acceptability of war. Second, in addition to the acceptability of war, what other factors affect support for defense spending? Our principal finding is that citizen acceptance of war and support for defense spending are most influenced by basic beliefs and values. Gender also has a strong negative influence on attitudes toward war and thus indirectly lowers support for defense spending among women. Attitudes toward war and defense spending are also sometimes influenced by short-term threats and by alliance considerations, but the effects are not as substantively meaningful. We conclude with a summary of the results and a discussion of the implications for theory and policy

The Fiscal Impact of the U. S. Military Assistance Program, 1967-1976

The study of U.S. arms transfers and their impact on the fiscal decisions of aid recipients has been the subject of various interpretations and competing explanations. Absent in this literature has been a systematic testing of propositions derived from a general theory of aid impacts. A larger and somewhat related body of research has examined the political (Chaudhuri 1972; Hughes 1967; Gutteridge 1967) and general economic effects of domestic military spending (Deger and Smith 1983; Smith 1977, 1980; Benoit 1978; Kennedy 1974; Whynes 1979). These studies, however, have not examined the fiscal impact of foreign military assistance. To date only a few researchers have studied this issue in any systematic fashion (McGuire 1979, 1982; Wolf 1971). In this study we seek to fill this gap by applying grant economics theory (Pigou 1932; Oates 1972) to study the fiscal impact of U.S. military arms transfers on foreign nations. Drawing on the domestic aid literature (Oates 1972; Gramlich 1972), we identify a set of propositions concerning the expenditure decisions of domestic aid recipients, and test these propositions against the fiscal behavior of Military Assistance Program (MAP) recipients between 1967-1976. In addition to the substantive import of this question and its bearing on the implementation of U.S. foreign policy, this research provides a unique opportunity to test the applicability of domestic aid theory to the study of foreign aid policy

A comment on McCaleb's “The size principle and collective-consumption payoffs to political coalitions”

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45509/1/11127_2005_Article_BF01705953.pd

FDCCS16 molecular simulation of the thermophysical properties and phase behaviour of impure CO2 relevant to CCS

Impurities from the CCS chain can greatly influence the physical properties of CO2. This has important design, safety and cost implications for the compression, transport and storage of CO2. There is an urgent need to understand and predict the properties of impure CO2 to assist with CCS implementation. However, CCS presents demanding modelling requirements. A suitable model must both accurately and robustly predict CO2 phase behaviour over a wide range of temperature and pressure, and maintain that predictive power for CO2 mixtures with numerous, mutually interacting chemical species. A promising technique to address this task is molecular simulation. It offers a molecular approach, with foundations in firmly established physical principles, along with the potential to predict the wide range of physical properties required for CCS. The quality of predictions from molecular simulation depends on accurate force-fields to de- scribe the interactions between CO2 and other molecules. Unfortunately, there is currently no universally applicable method to obtain force-fields suitable for molecular simulation. In this paper we present two methods of obtaining force-fields: the first being semi-empirical and the second using ab-initio quantum-chemical calculations. In the first approach we optimise the impurity force-field against measurements of the phase and pressure-volume behaviour of CO2 binary mixtures with N2, O2, Ar and H2. A gradient-free optimiser allows us to use the simulation itself as the underlying model. This leads to accurate and robust predictions under conditions relevant to CCS. In the second approach we use quantum-chemical calculations to produce ab-initio evaluations of the interactions between CO2 and relevant impurities, taking N2 as an exemplar. We use a modest number of these calculations to train a machine-learning algorithm, known as a Gaussian process, to describe these data. The resulting model is then able to accurately predict a much broader set of ab-initio force-field calculations at comparatively low numerical cost. Although our method is not yet ready to be implemented in a molecular simulation, we outline the necessary steps here. Such simulations have the potential to deliver first-principles simulation of the thermodynamic properties of impure CO2, without fitting to experimental data

Gender Difference or Parallel Publics? The Dynamics of Defense Spending Opinions in the United States, 1965-2007

Gender is now recognized as an important dividing line in American political life, and scholars have accumulated evidence that national security issues are an important reason for gender differences in policy preferences. We therefore expect that the dynamics of support for defense spending among men and women will differ. In contrast, several scholars have shown that population subgroups exhibit a ‘‘parallel’’ dynamic in which the evolution of their preferences over time is very similar, despite differences in the average level of support. Unfortunately, there is little time series evidence on gendered reactions to policy, including defense spending, that would allow one to arbitrate between these competing perspectives. In this research note, we assemble a time series of support for defense spending among men and women and model the determinants of that support for the period 1967–2007. We find that women are on average less supportive of defense spending than are men. However, we also find that the over time variation of support for defense spending among men and women is very similar—each is conditioned principally by the past year’s change in defense spending and occasionally by war casualties and a trade-off between defense and civilian spending

Confrontational Behavior and Escalation to War 1816-1980: A Research Plan

The understanding of international war, like many complex social events, may be - and has been - ap proached from a range of theoretical perspectives and via a variety of research strategies. Outside of the work of Bloch (1898), Sorokin (1936), Richardson (1941), and Wright (1942), however, there was little re search of a scientific nature until the mid-1960s. And while these past fifteen years have certainly not given us a compelling theory of international war, they have seen a steady growth in cumulative knowledge regar ding the correlates of war. These results, despite the expected mix of inconsistencies and anomalies, provide us with some sense of the factors that are most consistently associated with war over the last century and a half, along with some tentative insights into the rising and declining potency of these factors.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68556/2/10.1177_002234338201900104.pd

Tradeoffs in Trade Data: Do Our Assumptions Affect Our Results?

Researchers investigating the link between trade and peace often face a severe problem of list-wise deletion from missing trade data. Attempts to mitigate this problem include assuming that most observations are zero or imputing the values of such flows. We compare two frequently used trade data sets (the Gleditsch data set and the Correlates of War Project data set). We classify individual observations as observed, constructed or missing. We demonstrate that state attributes are systematically related to different categories of trade data. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we also find that replacing some missing data with estimated values tends to inflate the effects of trade in conflict models, although the effects differ by data set

A mind you can count on: validating breath counting as a behavioral measure of mindfulness.

Mindfulness practice of present moment awareness promises many benefits, but has eluded rigorous behavioral measurement. To date, research has relied on self-reported mindfulness or heterogeneous mindfulness trainings to infer skillful mindfulness practice and its effects. In four independent studies with over 400 total participants, we present the first construct validation of a behavioral measure of mindfulness, breath counting. We found it was reliable, correlated with self-reported mindfulness, differentiated long-term meditators from age-matched controls, and was distinct from sustained attention and working memory measures. In addition, we employed breath counting to test the nomological network of mindfulness. As theorized, we found skill in breath counting associated with more meta-awareness, less mind wandering, better mood, and greater non-attachment (i.e., less attentional capture by distractors formerly paired with reward). We also found in a randomized online training study that 4 weeks of breath counting training improved mindfulness and decreased mind wandering relative to working memory training and no training controls. Together, these findings provide the first evidence for breath counting as a behavioral measure of mindfulness