[gov3009-l] Spirling on "Power and Polity: A New Look at Democratic Effectiveness"

Hello, We hope you will join us this Wednesday, April 14th at the Applied Statistics workshop when we will be happy to have Arthur Spirling from the Department of Government. Details and an abstract are below. A light lunch will be served. Thanks! "Power and Polity: A New Look at Democratic Effectiveness" (with Jonathan Renshon) Arthur Spirling Government Department April 14th, 2010, 12 noon K354 CGIS Knafel (1737 Cambridge St) Abstract: We consider the link between democracy and war outcomes, which has been the subject of lively and long-standing debate. We contend that prior work has been hampered by data choice, research design and statistical approach. Building on previous efforts, we introduce a newly extended Bradley-Terry (BT) model that is well-suited for the question at hand: what factors help states win wars and militarized disputes? In addition to the methodological innovations detailed here, we present important new substantive findings that clarify and extend our understanding of the link between regime type and military effectiveness. Our approach allows more precision as regards the effects of democracy in waging and winning wars. We identify a number of other factors that significantly impact the odds of victory (e.g. the 'initiation effect'). Subsequently, we use the MID dataset to extend the scope of investigation and show that democracies are more likely than other regime types to prevail in disputes that fall short of war. In doing so, we demonstrate that the 'democratic advantage' operates in conflicts at every level of intensity and not in high-stakes wars alone, as previously believed. A copy of the paper is available upon request from Arthur: aspirling(a)gov.harvard.edu Cheers, matt.