In this paper, we summarize a series of experimental studies that show that democracies don't fight each other because their leaders have very few political incentives to do so. The use of force against other democracies is perceived by the public and by leaders of democratic states as a failure...

Prior scholarly analysis of Israeli military spending has focused on national security questions. We present a mathematical model incorporating security threats as well as electoral cycles and corporate profits. The parameters are estimated empirically. The results support the idea that in...

The literature on defense-welfare tradeoffs has not been characterized by an emphasis on theory development. Indeed, most work has concentrated on using increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques to isolate empirical relationships in spending data on various countries. Unfortunately,...

A growing number of studies in international relations use experiments. Roth (1995) discusses at least three purposes for experiments: (i) testing theoretically derived models, or ''speaking to theorists''; (ii) data generation, which he called ''searching for facts,''; and (iii) ''searching for...

This chapter offers an analysis of the decision code of Khaled Mashal, the former leader of the Hamas organization. Using the Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) method, it examines five decisions made by Mashal in 2011–2017. The analysis suggests that Mashal tends to use mainly the poliheuristic...