Daina Chiba

The shape of things to come? Expanding the inequality and grievance model for civil war forecasts with event data

We examine if dynamic information from event data can help improve on a model attempting to forecast civil war using measures reflecting plausible motivation and grievances. Buhaug, Cederman, and Gleditsch predict the risk of civil war using a horizontal inequality model with measures reflecting motivation and relevant group characteristics at the country level. The predictions from their model outperform in an out-of-sample forecast conventional country-level models of civil war, emphasizing vertical inequality and country characteristics. However, most grievance measures change little over time. We surmise that a model reflecting potential motivation for conflict can be improved with more dynamic information on mobilization and the behavior of actors. Our conjecture receives some support in the empirical analysis, where we consider both conflict onset and termination over territorial and governmental incompatibilities in the Uppsala/PRIO Armed Conflict Data, and find some evidence that event data can help improve forecasts. Moreover, models with the original grievance measures do better than purely event based models, supporting our claim that both structure and event based components can add value to conflict prediction models. However, the contribution of events to improving predictive power is modest and not entirely consistent, and some types of conflict events seem easier to forecast than others.

Major Powers and Militarized Conflict

This article attempts to answer the question of why major powers engage in more active foreign policy behaviors than minor powers. It does so by comparing two explanations for the increased conflict propensity of major powers. The first explanation focuses on major powers’ observable capabilities, while the second stresses their different behavior. We incorporate both into an ultimatum model of conflict in which a state’s cost of conflict consists of both observable and behavioral components. Using data from the period from 1870 to 2001, we empirically illustrate the observable and behavioral differences between major and minor powers. We then utilize a decomposition model to assess the relative significance of the two explanations. The results suggest that most of the difference in conflict propensity between major and minor powers can be attributed to observable differences.

Careful Commitments: Democratic States and Alliance Design

Evidence suggests that leaders of democratic states experience high costs from violating past commitments. We argue that because democratic leaders foresee the costs of violation, they are careful to design agreements they expect to have a high probability of fulfilling. This may cause democratic leaders to prefer flexible or limited commitments. We evaluate our argument by analyzing the design of alliance treaties signed by countries of the world between 1815 and 2003. We find that alliances formed among democratic states are more likely to include obligations for future consultation rather than precommitting leaders to active conflict, and defense pacts formed among democratic states are more likely to specify limits to the conditions under which member states must join their partners in conflict. This research suggests that separating screening effects and constraining effects of international agreements is even more difficult than previously believed. States with the greatest likelihood of being constrained are more carefully screened.

Institutional Opposition, Regime Accountability, and International Conflict

Can international organizations constrain a leader’s behavior during a military crisis? Existing studies have shown that joint membership in international organizations reduces the likelihood of dispute initiation; however, whether institutional opposition can prevent an ongoing conflict from escalating has yet to be investigated. We develop and test a theory of how domestic politics provides a mechanism through which international organizations can reverse the course of a military crisis. The argument leads to the hypothesis that more accountable regimes are less likely to escalate military crises when an international organization opposes their actions. We test the hypothesis with an analysis of territorial disputes from 1946 to 1995. We find that while neither institutional opposition nor the degree of regime accountability independently reduces the tendency for a country to escalate a conflict, the joint effect of the two does.