Replication data for: Disputes, Democracies, & Dependencies: A Re-examination of the Kantian Peace

Militarized interstate disputes are widely thought to be less likely among democratic countries that have high levels of trade and extensive participation in international organizations. We re-examine this broad finding of the Kantian peace literature in the context of a model that incorporates the high degree of dependency among countries. Based on in-sample statistical tests, as well as out-of-sample, predictive cross-validation, we find that results frequently cited in the literature are plagued by over-fitting and can not be characterized as identifying the underlying structure through which international conflict is influenced by democracy, trade, and international governmental organizations. We conclude that much of the statistical association typically reported in this literature apparently stems from three components: a) geographical proximity, b) dependence among militarized interstate disputes with the same initiator or target, and c) the higher-order dependencies in these dyadic data. Once these are incorporated, covariates associated with the Kantian peace tripod lose most of their statistical power. We do find that higher levels of joint democracy are associated with lower probabilities of militarized interstate dispute involvement. We find that despite high statistical significance and putative substantive importance, none of the variables representing the Kantian tripod is associated with any substantial degree of predictive power.学界普遍认为，贸易往来密切、深度参与国际组织的民主国家之间，国家间军事化争端（militarized interstate disputes）的发生概率更低。我们在纳入国家间高度依赖关系的模型框架下，重新检验了康德和平研究文献中的这一核心论断。基于样本内统计检验与样本外预测交叉验证，我们发现该文献中被广泛引用的研究结论存在过拟合问题，无法准确识别民主、贸易与国际政府间组织对国际冲突的影响路径。我们的研究表明，该文献中通常报告的统计关联主要源于三个因素：a) 地理邻近性；b) 同一发起方或目标方的国家间军事化争端的序列依赖性；c) 这类二元数据中的高阶依赖关系。一旦纳入上述因素，与康德和平三角（Kantian peace tripod）相关的协变量便失去了大部分统计效力。我们确实发现，更高水平的联合民主程度与更低的国家间军事化争端参与概率相关。尽管代表康德和平三角的各变量在统计上具有较高显著性且被认为具有实质重要性，但我们的研究发现，这些变量均未体现出任何显著的预测能力。