Status Quo Preferences and Disputes Short of War

Abstract

This paper suggests that the importance of preferences for the international order extend beyond the conditions proposed by power transition theory. Specifically, a dissimilarity of preferences for the international order should affect relations for all states in the international system for all levels of dispute. In essence, I posit that disagreements over the norms and rules that comprise the international order should increase the domain of conflict for all dyads—even when they have neither the ability nor opportunity to directly affect the construction of the international order. To test the above argument, I propose two new Euclidean-distance measures of dissimilarities of economic and security preferences. Using a series of logits and their predicted probabilities on data from the post-World War II period, I find that a dissimilarity of preferences for the status quo has an important, incendiary effect on the likelihood of dyadic disputes short of war. In fact, dissimilar preferences for the economic and security status quo provide greater leverage in explaining disputes short of war than even such traditionally important variables as the lowest level of dyadic democracy and economic interdependence.

Notes

1. The terms “international order,” “international status quo,” and “status quo” are used interchangeably in this paper.

2. Gartzke (2000) tests this argument by examining dyadic “affinity” (as measured by the correlation of UN voting profiles). Consequently, this work does not directly address how a dissimilarity of preferences for the U.S.-led international order might affect dyadic disputes.

3. Indeed, there are powerful states that were widely considered to be dissatisfied with the international order (e.g., the USSR during the Cold War) and less powerful states that are by all accounts extremely satisfied with the current order (e.g., Belgium).

4. The EUGene codebook notes that the S correlations are an improvement over Tau-B in that, “S evaluates the rank order correlation for two states' alliance portfolios. Unlike Tau-B, S also takes into account both the presence and absence of an alliance in the correlation calculation. For example, the fact that a state has identical alliances with some states as well as no alliances with identical sets of other states is accounted for in the S calculation, but not in Tau-B” (Bennett and Stam, 2000).

5. Only great powers have the ability to change and then maintain the international status quo.

6. The Polity III dataset (as provided in EUGene 3.1) used as the basis of the institutional format variable limits the time span of these analyses to 1994.

7. Multidimensional scaling can provide graphical representations of distances between actors. For further explanation of MDS procedures as well as graphical examples see Jacoby (1986), DeVries (1990), and Blanton (1999).

8. The asymmetry of trade is especially apparent between countries of different levels of development. For example, in 1955 the U.S. traded only .0002% of its GDP with Honduras, while Honduras traded 21% of its GDP with the U.S.

9. The ALSCAL procedure is available through SPSS 10.1.

10. MDS discovers structures underlying the observed relations among “stimuli, concepts, traits, persons, cultures, species or nations” (Shepard, Romney and Nerlove, 1972, p. xiii) and uses all available information to place states on the scale. Thus, even if no data are available for trade between two states, information from states' entire trade profile is used to obtain the relative location of each state regarding the other.

11. The security and trade matrices are scaled on one dimension for each year from 1950 to 1980. These base data are available from the author. Goodness-of-fit statistics range from an S stress of 0.10 to 0.15 for alliance profiles and an S stress of 0.36 to 0.53 for bilateral trade profiles. The R²'s for alliances range from 0.95 to 0.98 (depending on the year of estimation), while those for trade range from 0.34 to 0.67.

12. Indeed, as Organski (1968, p. 366) notes, “the dominant nation is necessarily more satisfied with the existing international order than any other since it is to a large extent its [emphasis added] international order.” States establishing ties to the dominant power do so with the knowledge that their actions are an implicit form of support for the current international system. Conversely, states that have limited direct or indirect ties to the dominant power may be expressing their lack of integration in the international order.

13. State_A's alliance profile includes information on the states with which an alliance exists and the type of alliance. These profiles include information on the states with which State_A has no alliance. Thus, an “S” correlation of any state's alliance profile with the U.S. provides an aggregate measure of the entirety of similar and nonsimilar alliance partners (either direct or nondirect) that a state has with the U.S.

14. Unless otherwise stated, control variables were obtained from EUGene 3.1.

15. The odds ratios are a transformation of the β parameters where “for a unit change in x _k , the odds are expected to change by a factor of exp(β _k ) holding all other variables constant” (Long, 1997, p. 80). The odds ratios can be translated to a percentage change in the odds by subtracting one from each coefficient and multiplying by 100. Therefore, coefficients above one are those with a positive effect on disputes while those below one have a negative effect on disputes.

16. Reversing the odds ratio to the odds of no dispute versus dispute translates to an odds ratio of 1.152, or a 15% increase, in the odds of no dispute.

17. That is, from the 3^rd percentile score of the worst form of autocracy (i.e., −10) to the 93^rd percentile score of mixed democracy (i.e., 5).

18. For example, from the 75^th percentile score of 0.86 to the 95^th percentile score of 1.71.

19. Note that previous findings suggesting a negative impact of trade dependence on conflict have been based on the use of a politically relevant sample. However, because the benefits from trade with larger economies are inflated (Polachek, Robst, and Chang, 1999), such a sample falsely increases the impact of economic dependence on conflict because of the dramatically increased number of dyads that include major powers (Benson, 2005).

20. Because power transition theory does not address disputes short of war, this finding should not be taken as a refutation of the theory.

21. Predicted probabilities were calculated using the prgen command in Stata 9.0.

22. Specifically, nonallied, noncontiguous dyads with no economic interdependence and 2 years of nondispute interactions. The median values for the dissimilarity of security preferences for the status quo is .35, for the dissimilarity of economic preferences is .6351539, and for the lowest level of dyadic democracy is −7.

23. Predicted probabilities for different levels of the lowest level of democracy were calculated at values of −10, −8, −6, −4, −2, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. Predicted probabilities for different levels of the dissimilarity of security status quo preferences were calculated at values of 0, .265, .53, .795, 1.06, 1.325, 1.59, 1.855, 2.12, 2.385, and 2.65. Predicted probabilities for different levels of the dissimilarity of economic status quo preferences were calculated at values of 0, .422, .844, 1.267, 1.689, 2.112, 1.534, 2.956, 3.379, 3.80, and 4.223.

24. Specifically, the alliance variable is set at 1, contiguity is set at 6, the lowest level of dyadic democracy is set at 6, and all other variables are set at their median values.

25. Additional tests suggested that the interaction between security and economic preferences was not statistically significant. Therefore, a dissimilarity of security and economic preferences has an additive rather than multiplicative effect on disputes short of war.

Gibler, Douglas M. (2004). “An Assessment of the Validity of Empirical Measures of State Satisfaction with the Status Quo.” Unpublished manuscript.