The predominant operationalizations of enduring rivalries use a period of time without a militarized dispute to identify the termination of such rivalries. The author argues that this misses the true termination date of most rivalries because it does not identify when the underlying disputed...

The authors investigate the relationship between system structure and the initiation of militarized disputes among Great Powers. The central hypotheses concern the interaction between system uncertainty and the risk propensity of national decision makers. The authors employ a research design...

Signorino and Ritter developed and advocated a new measure of the political similarity of states (S). They demonstrated logical flaws associated with the common Kendall's Ï„ b -based alliance similarity measure and showed that using S may yield quite different similarity estimates. But...

Researchers face three basic questions when testing theoretically driven hypotheses. First is research design: for example, what population should be analyzed, what sample should be drawn from that population, and what cases should be excluded from the sample? What statistical estimator should...

The authors advance a general perspective on how to incorporate the notion of foreign policy substitutability in probabilistic models of international politics. They suggest that substitutability may be dealt with in one of two ways, namely, (1) through better specification or (2) through the...

The EUGene software program has become widely used in quantitative international relations. Originally planned to develop expected utility data, over time it has become a general-purpose tool for constructing data sets for use in the study of international conflict, particularly data sets with...