Exploring Operationalizations of Political Relevance

During the past decade, researchers have commonly employed one of two sets of interstate dyads as the population of cases in quantitative analyses of international conflict, either “all dyads” or “politically relevant dyads.” The main argument against using the “all dyads” set is that includes many dyads where there is no chance of conflict, and so analysts using this set are examining many pairs of states in which the hypotheses in question are irrelevant. The criticism of politically relevant dyads is that this set does not capture 15-20% of the actual conflicts that actually occur. In this paper I examine the current operationalization of “political relevance” to see whether the operationalization can be slightly modified and encompass all actual conflicts. If it could be, then use of the modified politically relevant dyad case subset might be more appropriate or have advantages over what is currently employed. I conclude that while it is possible to improve upon current operationalizations of political relevance (in terms of capturing conflicts), it is difficult to reach a 100% capture rate. It is also clear from the analysis that the various politically relevant operationalizations do better at capturing wars than MIDs, and do better at capturing the actions of MID and war originators than MID and war joiners. Note: An earlier version of this paper was originally presented at the 2001 American Political Science Association Meetings. Introduction During the past decade, researchers have commonly employed one of two sets of interstate dyads as the population of cases analyzed in quantitative analyses of international conflict. Some scholars examine all dyads, namely the set of pairings of all states with all other states. Other scholars examine only “politically relevant” dyads, defined as pairs of states where either the states are geographically contiguous (either on land, or over some relatively small amount of water), or where at least one is a major power. Beginning with one of these data sets, we typically estimate the probability of a militarized interstate dispute (MID), and then in some analyses, the probability of the MID escalating to war. The probability of conflict is believed to be higher among these “relevant” countries, as are the effects of typical independent variables we examine. While many of our most robust findings hold regardless of which subset of cases is employed as the base population, research has also found that some findings vary depending on which case subset is used (e.g. Bennett and Stam 2000a, Lemke and Reed 2001). This poses a problem for researchers doing dyad-year analysis, as the decision to use one set of dyads over the other is not inconsequential. Ideally, we should make the choice between these case subsets on theoretical grounds. However, in the absence of tight theory that specifies a very precise domain, arguments can be made in favor of both subsets, and the dilemma remains. In this paper, I will explore a key empirical fact that seems to militate against using politically relevant dyads. This is the fact that, as appealing as the politically relevant dyad set may appear theoretically, using it means that we miss predicting a sizeable number of international conflicts because they occur outside that set of dyads. As empirically oriented scholars, it is difficult to argue in favor of analyses that we know ex ante will mispredict a variety of conflicts. The question I explore here is whether there are relatively simple modifications that