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Does leader age matter for the likelihood of interstate conflict? Many studies in biology, psychology, and physiology have found that aggression tends to decline with age throughout the adult lifespan, particularly in males. Moreover, a number of major international conflicts have been attributed to young leaders, including the conquests of Alexander the Great and the ambitious military campaigns of Napoleon. However, the exact nature of the relationship between leader age and international conflict has been difficult to study because of the endogeneity problem. Leaders do not come to power randomly. Rather, many domestic and international factors influence who becomes the leader of a country, and some of these factors could correlate with the chances of interstate conflict. For instance, wary democratic publics might favor older leaders when future international conflict seems likely, inducing a relationship between older leaders and interstate conflict. This article overcomes such confounding by using a regression discontinuity design. Specifically, it looks at close elections of national leaders who had large differences in age. It finds that when older candidates barely defeated younger ones, countries were much less likely to engage in military conflict. Its sample is also fairly representative of democracies more broadly, meaning that the findings likely hold true for cases outside the sample. The results demonstrate the important role that individuals play in shaping world politics. They also illustrate the value of design-based inference for learning about important questions in the study of international relations and peace science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Placebo tests are increasingly common in applied social science research, but the methodological literature has not previously offered a comprehensive account of what we learn from them. We define placebo tests as tools for assessing the plausibility of the assumptions underlying a research design relative to some departure from those assumptions. We offer a typology of tests defined by the aspect of the research design that is altered to produce it (outcome, treatment, or population) and the type of assumption that is tested (bias assumptions or distributional assumptions). Our formal framework clarifies the extra assumptions necessary for informative placebo tests; these assumptions can be strong, and in some cases similar assumptions would justify a different procedure allowing the researcher to relax the research design's assumptions rather than test them. Properly designed and interpreted, placebo tests can be an important device for assessing the credibility of empirical research designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Major theories of military innovation focus on relatively narrow technological developments, such as nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers. Arguably the most profound military implications of technological change, however, come from more fundamental advances arising from 'general-purpose technologies' (GPTs), such as the steam engine, electricity, and the computer. Building from scholarship on GPTs and economic growth, we argue that the effects of GPTs on military effectiveness are broad, delayed, and shaped by indirect productivity spillovers. We label this impact pathway a 'general-purpose military transformation' (GMT). Contrary to studies that predict GPTs will rapidly diffuse to militaries around the world and narrow gaps in capabilities, we show that GMTs can reinforce existing balances if leading militaries have stronger linkages to a robust industrial base in the GPT than challengers. Evidence from electricity's impact on military affairs, covering the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, supports our propositions about GMTs. To probe the explanatory value of our theory and account for alternative interpretations, we compare findings from the electricity case to the military impacts of submarine technology, a non-GPT that emerged in the same period. Finally, we apply our findings to contemporary debates about artificial intelligence, which could plausibly cause a profound GMT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What public pressures do leaders face in international disputes? Leaders often denounce foreign actions as provocations, triggering public anger and demands for restitution. Rather than generating a reflexive rally around the flag, we argue that leaders who invoke foreign provocations—whether hypothetical, remembered, exaggerated, or real—face heightened public disapproval if they fail to take tough action in the present. Across two survey experiments and a quasi-experiment involving US naval patrols in the South China Sea, we find that incidents construed as provocative increase public pressure on the Chinese government to respond or incur public disapproval. We discuss possible explanations, how government elites seek to mitigate public disapproval, and how such events can change the logic of coercion and deterrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reputations for resolve are said to be one of the few things worth fighting for, yet they remain inadequately understood. Discussions of reputation focus almost exclusively on first-order belief change— A stands firm, B updates its beliefs about A 's resolve. Such first-order reputational effects are important, but they are not the whole story. Higher-order beliefs—what A believes about B 's beliefs, and so on—matter a great deal as well. When A comes to believe that B is more resolved, this may decrease A 's resolve, and this in turn may increase B 's resolve, and so on. In other words, resolve is interdependent. We offer a framework for estimating higher-order effects, and find evidence of such reasoning in a survey experiment on quasi-elites. Our findings indicate both that states and leaders can develop potent reputations for resolve, and that higher-order beliefs are often responsible for a large proportion of these effects (40 percent to 70 percent in our experimental setting). We conclude by complementing the survey with qualitative evidence and laying the groundwork for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes coercion succeed? For most international relations scholars, the answer is credible threats. Yet scholars have neglected a second key component of successful coercion: credible assurances. This article makes two contributions to our understanding of coercion and credible assurances. First, we offer a theoretical framework exploring the causes and consequences of assurance credibility. In order to coerce the target, a challenger must issue both credible threats that defiance will be met with punishment, and credible assurances that compliance will be met with restraint. In turn, the credibility of assurances is determined by power and a reputation for restraint. Whereas greater power boosts credible threats, it undermines credible assurances. Therefore, powerful states must cultivate a reputation for restraint in order to issue credible assurances. Second, we provide empirical support for our claims through a nationally representative, scenario-based survey experiment that explores how US citizens respond to a hypothetical coercive dispute with China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To help humanity solve fundamental problems of cooperation, scientists need to reconceive artificial intelligence as deeply social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) researchers play an important role in the ethics and governance of AI, including through their work, advocacy, and choice of employment. Nevertheless, this in uential group's attitudes are not well understood, undermining our ability to discern consensuses or disagreements between AI/ML researchers. To examine these researchers' views, we conducted a survey of those who published in two top AI/ML conferences (N = 524). We compare these results with those from a 2016 survey of AI/ML researchers (Grace et al., 2018) and a 2018 survey of the US public (Zhang & Dafoe, 2020). We find that AI/ML researchers place high levels of trust in international organizations and scientific organizations to shape the development and use of AI in the public interest; moderate trust in most Western tech companies; and low trust in national militaries, Chinese tech companies, and Facebook. While the respondents were overwhelmingly opposed to AI/ML researchers working on lethal autonomous weapons, they are less opposed to researchers working on other military applications of AI, particularly logistics algorithms. A strong majority of respondents think that AI safety research should be prioritized and that ML institutions should conduct pre-publication review to assess potential harms. Being closer to the technology itself, AI/ML researchers are well placed to highlight new risks and develop technical solutions, so this novel attempt to measure their attitudes has broad relevance. The findings should help to improve how researchers, private sector executives, and policymakers think about regulations, governance frameworks, guiding principles, and national and international governance strategies for AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What resources and technologies are strategic? Policy and theoretical debates often focus on this question, since the "strategic" designation yields valuable resources and elevated attention. The ambiguity of the very concept, however, frustrates these conversations. We offer a theory of when decision makers should designate assets as strategic based on the presence of important rivalrous externalities for which firms or military organizations will not produce socially optimal behavior on their own. We distill three forms of these externalities, which involve cumulative-, infrastructure-, and dependency-strategic logics. Although our framework cannot resolve debates about strategic assets, it provides a theoretically grounded conceptual vocabulary to make these debates more productive. To illustrate the analytic value of our framework for thinking about strategic technologies, we examine the US-Japan technology rivalry in the late 1980s and current policy discussions about artificial intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Threats and force, by increasing expected costs, should reduce the target's resolve. However, they often seem to increase resolve. We label this phenomenon provocation. We review instances of apparent provocation in interstate relations and offer a theory based on the logic of reputation and honor. We also consider alternative explanations: confounding or mis-imputation of resolve; revelation of information, character, or capabilities; or generalized sunk cost reasoning. Using survey experiments, we systematically evaluate whether provocation exists and what may account for it. We employ design-based causal inference techniques—a hypothetical natural experiment, a placebo treatment, and ruling out mediators—to evaluate our key hypotheses. We find strong evidence of provocation and suggestive evidence that it arises from considerations of honor, vengeance, and reputation. Our experimental design minimizes the risk that this result arises from our alternative explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biology can be misused, and the risk of this causing widespread harm increases in step with the rapid march of technological progress. A key security challenge involves attribution: determining, in the wake of a human-caused biological event, who was responsible. Recent scientific developments have demonstrated a capability for detecting whether an organism involved in such an event has been genetically modified and, if modified, to infer from its genetic sequence its likely lab of origin. We believe this technique could be developed into powerful forensic tools to aid the attribution of outbreaks caused by genetically engineered pathogens, and thus protect against the potential misuse of synthetic biology. A key security challenge with biosecurity threats is determining the responsible actor. In this Perspective, the authors review recent developments in using genetic sequence to assign a lab-of-origin and the potential protection it provides against misuse of synthetic biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study estimates the effect of data sharing on the citations of academic articles, using journal policies as a natural experiment. We begin by examining 17 high-impact journals that have adopted the requirement that data from published articles be publicly posted. We match these 17 journals to 13 journals without policy changes and find that empirical articles published just before their change in editorial policy have citation rates with no statistically significant difference from those published shortly after the shift. We then ask whether this null result stems from poor compliance with data sharing policies, and use the data sharing policy changes as instrumental variables to examine more closely two leading journals in economics and political science with relatively strong enforcement of new data policies. We find that articles that make their data available receive 97 additional citations (estimate standard error of 34). We conclude that: a) authors who share data may be rewarded eventually with additional scholarly citations, and b) data-posting policies alone do not increase the impact of articles published in a journal unless those policies are enforced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do government rhetoric and propaganda affect mass reactions in international crises? Using two scenario-based survey experiments in China, one hypothetical and one that selectively reminds respondents of recent events, we assess how government statements and propaganda impact Chinese citizens' approval of their government's performance in its territorial and maritime disputes. We find evidence that citizens disapprove more of inaction after explicit threats to use force, suggesting that leaders can face public opinion costs akin to audience costs in an authoritarian setting. However, we also find evidence that citizens approve of bluster—vague and ultimately empty threats—suggesting that talking tough can provide benefits, even in the absence of tough action. In addition, narratives that invoke future success to justify present restraint increase approval, along with frames that emphasize a shared history of injustice at the hands of foreign powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suppose we are interested in the effect of variable X on variable Y. If X and Y both influence, or are associated with variables that influence, a common outcome, called a collider, then conditioning on the collider (or on a variable influenced by the collider – its "child") induces a spurious association between X and Y, which is known as collider bias. Characterizing the magnitude and direction of collider bias is crucial for understanding the implications of selection bias and for adjudicating decisions about whether to control for variables that are known to be associated with both exposure and outcome but could be either confounders or colliders. Considering a class of situations where all variables are binary, and where X and Y either are, or are respectively influenced by, two marginally independent causes of a collider, we derive collider bias that results from (i) conditioning on specific levels of the collider or its child (on the covariance, risk difference, and in two cases odds ratio, scales), or (ii) linear regression adjustment for, the collider or its child. We also derive simple conditions that determine the sign of such bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We ask how the offense-defense balance scales, meaning how it changes as investments into a conflict increase. To do so we offer a general formalization of the offense-defense balance in terms of contest success functions. Simple models of ground invasions and cyberattacks that exploit software vulnerabilities suggest that, in both cases, growth in investments will favor offense when investment levels are sufficiently low and favor defense when they are sufficiently high. We refer to this phenomenon as offensive-then-defensive scaling or OD-scaling. Such scaling effects may help us understand the security implications of applications of artificial intelligence that in essence scale up existing capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are leaders from certain parties particularly likely to engage in military conflict? This question is difficult to answer because of selection bias. For example, countries may be more likely to elect right-wing leaders if their publics are more hawkish or if the international system is particularly dangerous. Put simply, who comes to power is not random, which makes causal inference difficult. We overcome this problem by using a regression discontinuity design. Specifically, we look at close presidential elections that were essentially "tossups" between two candidates. We find that electing right-wing candidates increases state aggression. We also find that electing candidates from challenger parties makes countries much more likely to initiate military disputes, particularly in the first year of the new leader's term. This result is consistent with other studies that find that the likelihood of state aggression increases following major leadership transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Survey experiments often manipulate the description of attributes in a hypothetical scenario, with the goal of learning about those attributes' real-world effects. Such inferences rely on an underappreciated assumption: experimental conditions must be information equivalent (IE) with respect to background features of the scenario. IE is often violated because subjects, when presented with information about one attribute, update their beliefs about others too. Labeling a country "a democracy," for example, affects subjects' beliefs about the country's geographic location. When IE is violated, the effect of the manipulation need not correspond to the quantity of interest (the effect of beliefs about the focal attribute). We formally define the IE assumption, relating it to the exclusion restriction in instrumental-variable analysis. We show how to predict IE violations ex ante and diagnose them ex post with placebo tests. We evaluate three strategies for achieving IE. Abstract encouragement is ineffective. Specifying background details reduces imbalance on the specified details and highly correlated details, but not others. Embedding a natural experiment in the scenario can reduce imbalance on all background beliefs, but raises other issues. We illustrate with four survey experiments, focusing on an extension of a prominent study of the democratic peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The study of reputation is one of the foundational topics of modern international relations. However, fundamental questions remain, including the question of to whom reputations adhere: states, leaders, or both? We offer a theory of influence‐specific reputations (ISR) that unifies competing accounts of reputation formation. We theorize that reputations will adhere more to actors who are more influential in the relevant decision‐making process. We employ two survey experiments, one abstract and one richly detailed involving a U.S.‐Iran conflict, to evaluate ISR. We find evidence of large country‐specific reputations and moderately sized leader‐specific reputations. Consistent with the theory of influence‐specific reputations, leader‐specific reputations are more important when leaders are more influential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If contractualism causes both democracy and peace, the correlation between democracy and peace is spurious. But the definition of contractualism is sufficiently unclear as to create doubts that it has such an impact. In addition, if democracy has an impact on contractualism, then, even with an otherwise perfectly specified model, controlling for contractualism will bias estimates of the effect of democracy on peace. International trade involves contracting behavior between strangers in different states. In addition, unlike contracting behavior within states, trade involves interactions in the same arena where interstate conflict needs to be deterred. Contractualist states have existed in significant numbers only recently. This limits contractualism’s ability to compete with democracy as a predictor of peace. Mousseau’s previous findings have been extraordinarily fragile. Finally, observational data should be complemented by multiple streams of evidence. Some experimental data support democratic peace theory; analogous experiments would almost certainly not provide evidence to support contractualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists routinely address temporal dependence by adopting a simple technical fix. However, the correct identification strategy for a causal effect depends on causal assumptions. These need to be explicated and justified; almost no studies do so. This article addresses this shortcoming by offering a precise general statement of the (nonparametric) causal assumptions required to identify causal effects under temporal dependence. In particular, this article clarifies when one should condition or not condition on lagged dependent variables (LDVs) to identify causal effects: one should not condition on LDVs, if there is no reverse causation and no outcome autocausation; one should condition on LDVs if there are no unobserved common causes of treatment and the lagged outcome, or no unobserved persistent causes of the outcome. When only one of these is true (with one exception), the incorrect decision will induce bias. Absent a well-justified identification strategy, inferences should be appropriately qualified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists are commonly advised to deduce and test all observable implications of their theories. We describe a principled framework for testing such “elaborate” theories: nonparametric combination. Nonparametric combination (NPC) assesses the joint probability of observing the theoretically predicted pattern of results under the sharp null of no effects. NPC accounts for the dependence among the component tests without relying on modeling assumptions or asymptotic approximations. Multiple-testing corrections are also easily implemented with NPC. As we demonstrate with four applications, NPC leverages theoretical knowledge into greater statistical power, which is particularly valuable for studies with strong research designs but small sample sizes. We implement these methods in a new R package, NPC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reputation has long been considered central to international relations, but unobservability, strategic selection, and endogeneity have handicapped quantitative research. A rare source of haphazard variation in the cultural origins of leaders-the fact that one-third of US presidents were raised in the American South, a well-studied example of a culture of honor-provides an opportunity to identify the effects of heightened concern for reputation for resolve. A formal theory that yields several testable predictions while accounting for unobserved selection into disputes is offered. The theory is illustrated through a comparison of presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and systematically tested using matching, permutation inference, and the nonparametric combination of tests. Interstate conflicts under Southern presidents are shown to be twice as likely to involve uses of force, last on average twice as long, and are three times more likely to end in victory for the United States than disputes under non-Southern presidents. Other characteristics of Southern presidencies do not seem able to account for this pattern of results. The results provide evidence that concern for reputation is an important cause of interstate conflict behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Technological determinism” is predominantly employed as a critic’s term, used to dismiss certain classes of theoretical and empirical claims. Understood more productively as referring to claims that place a greater emphasis on the autonomous and social-shaping tendencies of technology, technological determinism is a valuable and prominent perspective. This article will advance our understanding of technological determinism through four contributions. First, I clarify some debates about technological determinism through an examination of the meaning of technology. Second, I parse the family of claims related to technological determinism. Third, I note that constructivist and determinist insights may each be valid given particular scope conditions, the most prominent of which is the scale of analysis. Finally, I propose a theoretical microfoundation for technological determinism—military–economic adaptationism—in which economic and military competition constrain sociotechnical evolution to deterministic paths. This theory is a special case of a general theory—sociotechnical selectionism—which can be regarded as also including (mild) constructivist theories as special cases. Greater understanding of, respect for, and engagement with technological determinism will enhance the study of technology and our ability to shape our sociotechnical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From mobilizing masses to monitoring rebels, information and communication technologies (ICT) are transforming political conflict. We reflect on the contributions made by the articles of this special issue to the emerging ICT–political conflict research agenda, highlighting strengths of these articles, and offering suggestions for moving forward. Elaborate theory is crucial: it informs our standards of evidence, our choice of statistical models, our tests of competing theories, and our efforts to draw appropriate generalizations. Qualitative data is often neglected as a source of evidence, especially for evaluating the many competing mechanisms in this literature. Alternative explanations for results should be taken seriously, especially more mundane ones like confounding, measurement, and selection biases. We discuss in detail the risk that measurement bias could account for the prominent association between cellular coverage and (reported) conflict, and recommend several ways of evaluating and bounding this risk. We discuss the problem of temporal and spatial dependence for statistical inference – a problem that is often present for studies of ICTs – and point out that methodological solutions rely on (rarely stated) causal assumptions. Finally, we highlight key areas for future research, recommend a commitment to transparency best practices, and conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of this research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Countries with open capital markets tend to have fewer militarized disputes and wars. Gartzke, Li & Boehmer propose that this association arises from the enhanced ability of states with open capital markets to credibly signal resolve through the bearing of economic costs ex ante to militarized escalation. We test this causal mechanism by qualitatively examining six crucial cases in which the mechanism is most likely to be operative and observable. We employ a formal case selection strategy designed to yield cases with high inferential leverage for our confirmatory test and to select cases for an exploratory analysis of scope conditions. Through analysis of media reports, government documents, and other sources, we evaluate the extent to which relevant individuals drew the appropriate inferences about market-mediated costs and resolve. We conclude that while market-mediated signaling may operate in major conflicts, it is unlikely to account for much of the association between capital openness and peace. Exploratory analysis of our cases identifies potential scope conditions, clarifies the role of different signaling mechanisms, and suggests other explanations for the peaceful behavior of countries with open capital markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Justifications for war often invoke reputational or social aspirations: the need to protect national honor, status, reputation for resolve, credibility, and respect. Studies of these motives struggle with a variety of challenges: their primary empirical manifestation consists of beliefs, agents have incentives to misrepresent these beliefs, their logic is context specific, and they meld intrinsic and instrumental motives. To help overcome these challenges, this review offers a general conceptual framework that integrates their strategic, cultural, and psychological logics. We summarize important findings and open questions, including ( a) whether leaders care about their reputations and status, ( b) how to address the tension between instrumental and intrinsic motives, ( c) how observers draw inferences, ( d) to whom and across what contextual breadth these inferences apply, and ( e) how these relate to domestic audience costs. Many important, tractable questions remain for future studies to answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2013, a controversy arose when a working paper (Herndon, Ash, and Pollin 2013) claimed to show serious errors in a highly cited and influential economics paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (2010). The Reinhart and Rogoff paper had come to serve as authoritative evidence in elite conversations (Krugman 2013) that high levels of debt, especially above the “90 percent [debt/GDP] threshold” (Reinhart and Rogoff 2010, 577), posed a risk to economic growth. Much of the coverage of this controversy focused on an error that was a “perfect made-for-TV mistake” (Stevenson and Wolfers 2013) involving a simple error in the formula used in their Excel calculations. The real story here, however, is that it took three years for this error and other issues to be discovered because replication files were not publicly available, nor were they provided to scholars when asked. If professional norms or the American Economic Review had required that authors publish replication files, this debate would be advanced by three years and discussions about austerity policies would have been based on a more clear-sighted appraisal of the evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The greater peacefulness of jointly democratic pairs of states is an important finding in research on the causes of war. Here, we outline a set of criteria for evaluating critiques of such robust empirical associations and apply them to two recent articles. Mousseau (2013) claims that contract-intensive economies, as proxied by a measure of life insurance expenditure, account for the democratic peace. However, his research suffers from various problems of analysis and interpretation, including a miscoded dependent variable, a misleading specification for dyadic democracy, a suppression of heterogeneous associations, and a heavy dependence on imputation in which greater than 90% of the values of the central independent variable were (improperly) imputed. We estimate 144 specifications that build from Mousseau's models and control for life insurance expenditures, finding substantial, robust support for the democratic peace. Gartzke & Weisiger () claim that the importance of the democratic peace has declined as the proportion of democracies in the international system has increased; but their tests are misspecified and do not address the issue they raise. There are also serious errors in their data. When these problems are corrected, we find that the peacefulness of democratic pairs has actually increased as the proportion of democracies grew after 1816. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'democratic peace'-the inference that democracies rarely fight each other-is one of the most important and empirically robust findings in international relations (IR). This article surveys the statistical challenges to the democratic peace and critically analyzes a prominent recent critique (Gartzke 2007). Gartzke's claim that capitalist dynamics explain away the democratic peace relies on results problematically driven by (1) the censoring from the sample of observations containing certain communist countries or occurring before 1966, (2) the inclusion of regional controls, and (3) a misspecification of temporal controls. Analysis of these issues contributes to broader methodological debates and reveals novel characteristics of the democratic peace. Gartzke and other critics have contributed valuably to the study of IR; however, the democratic peace remains one of the most robust empirical associations in IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]