Mancur Olson's theory of collective action could account for much of the variance in the defense burdens of the allied nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the early years of the Cold War, but the association between economic size (gross domestic product, or GDP) and...

Immanuel Kant believed that democracy, economic interdependence, and international law and organizations could establish the foundations for “perpetual peace.” Our analyses of politically relevant dyads show that each of the three elements of the Kantian peace makes a statistically...

The classical liberals believed that democracy and free trade would reduce the incidence of war. Here we conduct new tests of the `democratic peace', incorporating into the analyses of Maoz & Russett (1993) a measure of economic interdependence based on the economic importance of bilateral...

Some recent analyses challenge previous reports which show that economically important trade significantly reduces the probability of militarized disputes between countries. Beck et al. (1998) address the effect of temporal dependence in the time-series data on empirical support for the liberal...

In this study, the “rally effectâ€â€”the propensity for the American public to put aside political differences and support the president during international crises—is measured by considering the changes in presidential popularity following all 193 Militarized Interstate...

Jim Ray and others in this issue question customary procedures for the quantitative analysis of theoretically complex questions in the social sciences. In this article we address Ray's use of research on the Kantian peace to illustrate his points. We discuss his five guidelines for research,...

We consider the influence of countries' external security environments on their military spending. We first estimate the <italic>ex ante</italic> probability that a country will become involved in a fatal militarized interstate dispute using a model of dyadic conflict that incorporates key elements of liberal...

In their article in this issue, Donald P. Green, Soo Yeon Kim, and David H. Yoon claim, contrary to liberal theory and extensive evidence, that neither joint democracy nor economic interdependence significantly reduces the frequency of militarized interstate disputes in pooled time-series...

We assess the degree to which propositions from Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order can account for the incidence of militarized interstate disputes between countries during the period 1950-92. We find that such traditional realist influences as...