The Politics of Effective Aid and Interstate Conflict

The link between foreign aid and military conflict has received little attention in both aid effectiveness and interstate conflict research. This study provides a first-cut analysis of the impact of foreign aid on interstate conflict among recipient countries. In doing so, it opens the black box of state and builds on the previous research in the aid effectiveness literature and on the signaling processes in the conflict literature. Previous research indicates that the effectiveness of aid in improving citizen welfare is conditional on the presence of democratic institutions. This study shows that this conditional relationship has a detrimental effect on crisis bargaining outcomes. Foreign aid, on the one hand, increases citizen welfare in democratic regimes; hence, also governments' exante re-election prospects. On the other hand, foreign aid retards government ability to generate audience costs and to send informative signals to their opponents. Analyzing all dyads from 1961 to 2001 yields robust support for this view. As aid inflows increase, targets' resistance propensity against threats issued by democratic governments becomes statistically indistinguishable from threats issued by autocratic governments. Moreover, democratic states are not significantly more peaceful to each other than non-democratic pairs once we take into account the amount of foreign aid they receive

Why Some Countries are Immune to Resource Curse: The Role of Economic Norms

Replication material for Aytac, Erdem, Michael Mousseau, Omer F. Orsun. (Forthcoming) Why Some Countries are Immune to Resource Curse: The Role of Economic Norms. Democratizatio

Does Market-Capitalist Peace Supersede the Democratic Peace? The Evidence Still Says Yes

Replication Material for Michael Mousseau, Omer F. Orsun, Jameson Ungerer, and Demet Yalcin Mousseau. 2013. Does Market-Capitalist Peace Supersede the Democratic Peace? The Evidence Still Says Yes. in Assesing the Capitalist Peace, eds. Gerald Schneider and Nils Peter Gleditsch. pp. 127-13

Accounting for Extra-Dyadic Sources of International Outcomes

Leaders consider the broader international landscape when making foreign policy choices. This landscape could encompass a single external actor, the local region, or even the whole international system. Quantitative analyses of international outcomes, however, frequently do not account for this broader context. This study suggests a corrective, illustrating the value of incorporating extra-dyadic variables into analyses with dyadic and monadic outcomes. The challenge is to parsimoniously capture theoretically salient elements of the multilateral environment. We contend that a measure that links distributions of power within any k-set of relevant states to uncertainty over conflict outcomes is a promising option for two reasons. First, the measure builds from and accords with canonical theories of international politics. Second, it offers scholars a simple and flexible means to define and account for the set of states that constitute the relevant multilateral landscape. Illustrative applications linking power distributions and outcome uncertainty to alliance formation and pursuit of nuclear weapons demonstrate that extra-dyadic factors consistently influence foreign policy outcomes. This study thus shows that situating such outcomes within their broader context is both feasible and substantively important. Moreover, it contributes to recent efforts to address shortcomings of monadic and dyadic studies

Replication data for: Capitalism and Peace: It's Keynes, Not Hayek

Replication Material for Michael Mousseau,Omer F. Orsun, Jameson Ungerer, and Demet Yalcin Mousseau. 2013. Capitalism and Peace: It's Keynes, Not Hayek. in Assesing the Capitalist Peace, eds. Gerald Schneider and Nils Peter Gleditsch. pp. 80-10