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Heterogeneity in the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs), 1816–2001: What Fatal MIDs Cannot Fix*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Douglas M. Gibler  and
Erin K. Little
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Abstract

We examine a major source of heterogeneity across cases in the Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute Dataset, 1816–2001, and demonstrate that this variation across cases biases most analyses of conflict. Disputes are coded using two logics—the familiar state-to-state militarized action represents one case while the second relies on sponsor governments to protest state targeting of private citizens. We show that the latter introduces additional measurement bias and does not match well the original conceptualization of what constituted a dispute. The protest-dependent cases are caused by different processes, and omitting them from analyses provides truer estimates of the effects of most conflict predictors. We find that previous controls for heterogeneity in the dispute data—such as using fatal militarized interstate disputes only—substantially underestimates the dangerous effects of contiguity and the pacifying effects of regime similarity. We also show that governments are seldom willing to risk militarized conflict for private citizens during these unique cases. We provide a list of the protest-dependent cases for future conflict analyses.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 189 - 199
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2016 

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Footnotes

*

Douglas M. Gibler is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama, Box 870213, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 (dmgibler@ua.edu). Erin K. Little is a PhD Candidate at the Department Political Science, University of Alabama, Box 870213, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 (eklittle@bama.ua.edu). The authors thank Zeev Maoz, Glenn Palmer, Scott Bennett, Faten Ghosn, Vito D’Orazio, Michael Kenwick, Matthew Lane, Aaron Shreve, Shareefa Al-Adwani, Tracy Quo Lin, and participants at a MID conference hosted by UC-Davis, January 24–25, 2014; they also thank Paul Hensel for additional help locating South American disputes. Thanks to Thorin Wright and participants at a UA workshop for comments on an earlier draft. Finally, Doug Gibler thanks the National Science Foundation for their generous support of this project (Award nos 0923406 and 1260492).

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