James H. Lebovic

Military Burden, Security Needs, and Economic Growth in the Middle East

Economic theory and existing empirical studies do not unambiguously indicate whether higher military expenditures retard or promote economic growth, nor have there been systematic attempts to discern the sources of military spending to help determine how much of that spending can realistically be reduced. This article examines the theoretical link between military spending and economic growth, explores the domestic and regional causes of this spending, and tests a model incorporating a simultaneous relationship between military spending and economic growth in a pooled time-series cross-sectional analysis on various groupings of Middle Eastern states. While the analysis is shown sensitive to assumptions about causality and the numerous problems of pooled data, the results indicate that higher military spending has suppressed economic growth in the Middle East region even when alternative measures of the military burden are used.

Uniting for Peace? Democracies and United Nations Peace Operations after the Cold War

Does the level of democracy of a country incline it toward participation in post-cold war era, United Nations (UN) peace operations? The link between democracy and multilateral peace operations in liberal theory is explored, and the expanding UN global presence and its in debtedness to democracies are examined. Hypotheses drawn from liberal and realist theory are tested on a global set of countries in the period between 1993 and 2001, using cross-sectional, time-series data and a Heckman selection model. The descriptive evidence and robust model results provide strong support for the proposition that the UN peace operations of the post-cold war era relied on democratic contributions. A country’s level of democracy accounts for why and how much countries contributed to these operations when competing with a host of alternative explanations derived from a realist and liberal perspective.

Spending Priorities and Democratic Rule in Latin America

Has democracy produced a shift in Latin American budget priorities from military to civilian spending? Do discerned shifts from military to civilian spending within democracies represent “hard choices,” that is, are they shifts of the “zero-sum” variety in which resources from one budget are effectively given to another? A budgetary model is developed to explain the change in nonmilitary relative to military spending. Cross-sectional time series data for a large number of Latin American countries in the period from 1974 to 1995 are used to test the model. Results show that level of democracy has a significant positive effect on the size of nonmilitary relative to military budgets, that Latin American democratization is producing significant budgetary changes, and that democratic countries rely on zero-sum trade-offs that defy prediction.

The forecasting accuracy and determinants of football rankings

Abstract Numerous models vie to explain the extent to which and the manner in which people use new information to reconsider existing beliefs. We analyze week-to-week changes in the rankings of big time college football teams to test predictions based on these models. We test logistic regression models of whether Top 25 teams moved up a certain number of places in the rankings following victories, using data on weekly movement in the AP rankings, 1985–95. The predictors in these models are indicators of inertia and constraint, rank elevators, and the passage of time. Lower-ranked teams move up faster after a victory than do higher-ranked teams, but moving up in the rankings after a victory is an incremental process — much more incremental than moving down after a loss. All the focal predictors in the models perform as expected in influencing a team’s chances of moving up following a win. That is, the odds of moving up are greater: the fewer prior losses a team has suffered; the lower the team’s rank before the victory; if an opening has occurred higher in the rankings; if the victory is over a ranked opponent, and especially a higher-ranked opponent; and if the standing of opponents played earlier in the season has risen. These results are most compatible with a model that combines what are often treated as contradictory ideas — that people are ‘naive scientists’ or ‘intuitive statisticians’, on the one hand, and that they are extremely conservative information processors, on the other.

The Law of Small Numbers

Armed with a new threat and promising technology, advocates of national missile defense (NMD) have framed the debate by presenting NMD as a break from traditional deterrence principles. The assumption that the United States faces new adversaries that cannot be deterred by U.S. offensive options and whether adversaries can and will use nuclear weapons to coerce the United States, given its inclination and ability to retaliate, are assessed. The effectiveness of NMD against various offensive threats is simulated. Conclusions indicate that NMD advocates have not made their case that cold war-era deterrence principles are ill suited to U.S. relations with fledgling nuclear states and that the expected value of a missile defense of any type and scale is low because it is unlikely to enhance global security above levels offered by retaliatory deterrence.

Using Military Spending Data: The Complexity of Simple Inference

This study assesses the reliability of estimates of the direction of military spending growth obtained from two main sources - the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). It examines the average directional agreement between early and late ACDA and SIPRI spending estimates for a full sample of countries and for seven different regions (Africa, East Asia, Latin America, Middle East, South Asia, NATO Europe, and the Warsaw Pact). It shows that the direction of ACDA and SIPRI estimates diverge significantly over time and that the two data sources appear especially challenged when estimating the sign of smaller, and especially negative, growth-rate changes and of spending in regions (Africa and the Middle East) where growth-rates vary markedly. It further establishes that, when a single source publishes consistent directional estimates, these estimates can diverge considerably from those published by the other source. Based on the findings, this study proposes a set of simple validation procedures and tests their strengths and weaknesses on various sets of countries.

Democracies and Transparency: Country Reports to the UN Register of Conventional Arms, 1992-2001

This study assesses participation in the UN Register of Conventional Arms (UNRCA) in its first decade (1992-2001) of operation to determine the effects of democracy on international transparency. First, the function of the UNRCA is discussed. Second, transparency is defined and then explained by democracy and factors recognized in two international politics theories: realism, which emphasizes the effects of state capabilities and interests, and liberal institutionalism, which stresses the facilitative role of international institutions. Third, preliminary judgments are offered based on the frequency and nature of participation in the UNRCA, the consistency between export and import reports to the register, and participation in the register by democracies and non-democracies. Fourth, a cross-sectional time-series logit model is specified and tested to determine the relative effects of democracy on participation in the UN register. The study concludes that existing international politics theories go a long way toward accounting for patterns of openness and deception in international politics but not the full extent that security policies owe to domestic structures and processes.

As time goes by: Daily opinion change during the Persian Gulf crisis

Abstract The period between the August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the beginning of the U.S.‐led military counteroffensive in January 1991 provides the focus for an analysis of the effect of daily events on U.S. public support for U.S. policy, President Bushs handling of the situation, and optimism that the crisis would be peacefully resolved. Three “good news and bad news” interpretations of the linkage between events and opinion are tested. Of these, only one, which emphasizes the erosive effect of the accumulation of events in a foreign policy crisis that drags on unresolved, proves consistent with the data.

The Middle East: The region as a system∗

Given that “regions” may also be “systems,” two model systems are presented and evaluated in an application to the Middle East. They are termed a “disordered” and an “ordered” system, and assume an interaction between nations and between unit and sytems level forces. However, these models offer divergent views on the causes and effects of national and systemic behavior, and indeed whether specific nations even qualify for regional membership. Danger lies in policy based on a misconception of a region.

Unity in Action: Explaining Alignment Behavior in the Middle East

Stephen Walt’s The Origin of Alliances is the most comprehensive, theoretically informed, and widely cited study to date of Middle East alignment behavior during and after the turbulent ‘Arab cold war’ period of the 1950s and 1960s. But Walt may have overstated the discordant character of inter-Arab behavior when he concludes that Arab states ‘balance’ more than they ‘bandwagon’. This study argues that the strength, duration, and ultimate impermanence of regional alignments against Israel indicate that they had a more important basis in ideology than Walt presumes or that realists can accept. Through a graphical portrayal of the results of a factor analysis performed on COPDAB (Conflict and Peace Data Bank) data for the 1948–78 period, and WEIS (World Event Interaction Survey) data for the 1966–93 period, this study establishes that, into the 1970s, the divisions implied by Walt never fully overshadowed the unity in opposition to Israel that was found among parties on the front lines of that confrontation. More specifically, it finds that concordance rather than division prevailed in relations among Israel’s principal adversaries, that concordance had an important basis in conflict with Israel, and that, by the late 1970s, regional politics were far less orderly. It supports a constructivist perspective by concluding that, as a focal point of Arab nationalism, the conflict with Israel imposed normative constraints upon the behavior of Arab leaders.