The Duck of Minerva

Phil Arena

I am an assistant professor of political science at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. I mostly write here about "rational choice" and IR theory. I also maintain my own blog, fparena.blogspot.com.

Recent Posts

What Patterns of Trade Might Tell us About the Democratic Peace

by Phil Arena | 11 February, 2013 |

Stop me if you've heard this one: it appears that wars between pairs of democracies are relatively rare compared to wars between other pairs of states.  Some people even think this relationship might be causal. In the decades since this empirical regularity first got everyone's attention, a number of different theoretical arguments have been developed to account for it.  A little known problem with all such explanations is that their additional observable implications are at odds with empirical observation.  As I mentioned when Dan interviewed me for a Duck podcast, every major explanation...

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The Role of Assumptions

by Phil Arena | 13 December, 2012 |

Earlier today, Brian Rathbun criticized "rationalists" for making assumptions.*  I have some thoughts on the matter, and I expressed many of them on Twitter.  And in the language of Twitter -- snark.  That was not the best response, and I regret the tone of my reaction, if not the substance thereof.  I'd like to try now for a more constructive dialogue. Let's start where we agree.  Brian writes It seems for rationalists that assumptions are statements that one makes to make the building of theoretical models easier.  It does not matter if they are true, only if they are useful. Assumptions...

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Leader Comebacks

by Phil Arena | 5 December, 2012 |

"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."  So spoke Winston Churchill, after the Allied victory in the Second Battle of El Alamein.  We could say much the same of his defeat in the 1945 general election.  A core assumption underlying most of the work analyzing the impact of domestic politics on international relations is that leaders want to remain in office.  Insofar as ensuring national survival, territorial integrity, and policy autonomy might help leaders retain power, focusing on political ambition often does not tell...

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Institutions, Norms, and Cooperation

by Phil Arena | 12 November, 2012 |

A strong correlation between cooperation and membership in international institutions is not enough to establish that international institutions cause cooperation.   If we're to claim that institutions matter, we need to at least identify mechanisms by which institutions might promote cooperation among actors who would otherwise be disinclined to cooperate with one another.  The mere fact that such mechanisms can be articulated does not itself tell us whether the correlation is causal, but it lends a certain measure of plausible to causal interpretations that would otherwise be lacking....

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Negotiating with Terrorists

by Phil Arena | 8 November, 2012 |

When governments offer concessions to dissident groups in the midst of a terror campaign, they often see an increase in violence take place afterwards. For example, between 1968 and 1977, attacks conducted by the ETA claimed the lives of 73 people.  Partial autonomy was granted to the Basque region in 1978, yet despite the fact that this represented a significant shift towards the desired outcome of the ETA, violence increased, over the next three years, the ETA would kill 235 people, and fatality levels remained elevated for decades. Why then do governments offer concessions? One answer is...

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Regional Variation in the Explanatory Power of War and Reason

by Phil Arena | 31 October, 2012 |

Many conversations about the empirical relevance of game-theoretic models of war begin and end with Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman's War and Reason.  That's unfortunate, but it's not exactly surprising.  Most game-theoretic studies of war do not include any empirical analysis, whereas War and Reason offered a systematic analysis of European dyads.  The standards by which BdM and Lalman would have the predictions of the International Interactions Game (IIG) be judged are clear. In the Behavioral Origins of War, Bennett and Stam seek to assess the relative explanatory power of all the major...

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The Difference Parties Don’t Make?

by Phil Arena | 21 October, 2012 |

To the best of my knowledge, no prominent peer-reviewed article in political science has reported a difference in the frequency with which the United States enters into conflict under Democratic presidents relative to Republican presidents.  That's not because no one has looked for such a difference (I know I have).  It's because, to date, no one has found one.  This is the file drawer problem in action. Now, we want to be careful not to over-interpret that.  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  There could be lots of reasons why we might fail to observe such a difference even if...

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Explaining Butter for Bombs Agreements

by Phil Arena | 16 October, 2012 |

In 1963, JFK predicted that there would be as many 25 nuclear powers by the 1970s.  Yet here we are, some 70 years later, and the number of states believed to possess nuclear weapons has grown from 4 to 9.  Why haven't more states joined the club? A variety of factors are undoubtedly at work (see this piece by Gartzke and Joon for a good attempt at bring systematic evidence to bear on this question). In this post, I am going to discuss one in particular: what William Spaniel refers to as "butter-for-bombs" agreements, wherein one state makes concessions to another in attempt to dissuade them...

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