Dyads, Rationalist Explanations for War, and the Theoretical Underpinnings of IR Theory

<p>Critiquing dyads as the unit of analysis in statistical work has become increasingly prominent; a number of scholars have demonstrated that ignoring the interdependencies and selection effects among dyads can bias our inference. My dissertation argues that the problem is even more serious. The bargaining model relies on the assumption that bargaining occurs between two states in isolation. When we relax this assumption one of the most crucial findings of these bargaining models vanishes: it is no longer irrational, even with complete information and an absence of commitment issues, for states to go to war. By accounting for the non-dyadic nature of interstate relations, we are better able to explain a number of empirical realities, and better able to predict when states will go to war.</p><p>In the first chapter of my dissertation I model a bargaining episode between three players and demonstrate its marked divergence from canonical bargaining models. In traditional two player bargaining models, it is irrational for states to go to war. I find this irrationality of war to be in part an artifact of limiting the focus to two players. In the model in chapter one, three states are bargaining over policy, and each state has a preference in relation to this policy. When these preferences diverge enough, it can become impossible for players to resolve their disputes peacefully. One implication of this model is that differences between two and three player bargaining is not just a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. The model in this chapter forms the core of the writing sample enclosed. Chapter two tests whether my own model is just an artifact of a particular set of assumptions. I extend the bargaining model to allow for N-players and modify the types of policies being bargained over, and I find that not only do the results hold, in many cases they are strengthened. The second chapter also changes chapter one's model so states are bargaining over resources rather than policy which results in a surprising finding: while we might expect states to be more willing to fight in defense of the homeland than over a policy, if more than two states are involved, it is in fact the disputes over territory that are significantly more peaceful.</p><p>In the final chapter of my dissertation, I attempt to apply the insights from the theoretical chapters to the study of interstate conflict and war. In particular, I compare a purely dyadic model of interstate crises to a model that accounts for non-dyadic interdependencies. The non-dyadic model that I present is an Additive and Multiplicative Effects Network model, and it substantially outperforms the traditional dyadic model, both in explaining the variance of the data and in predicting out of sample. By combining the theoretical work in the earlier chapters with the empirical work in the final chapter I can show that not only do dyadic models limit our ability to model the causes of conflict, but that by moving beyond the dyad we actually get notable gains in our ability to understand the world and make predictions.</p>Dissertatio