Modeling the coevolution of international and domestic institutions
| Date | 01 May 2016 |
| Author | T Camber Warren |
| Published date | 01 May 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343316633375 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
Modeling the coevolution of international
and domestic institutions: Alliances,
democracy, and the complex path to peace
T Camber Warren
Department of Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School
Abstract
While much previous research has examined the relationship between interstate military alliances and the structure of
domestic regimes, existing findings point in contradictory directions. Some have argued that democracies attract each
other as alliance partners, and thereby generate international peace as a consequence of their domestic regime type,
while others have argued that the causal relationship is reversed, and that international pacification creates the
necessary space for international alliances and domestic democratization. To disentangle this difficult empirical
relationship, this article presents an empirically grounded simulation model of the dynamic coevolution of interstate
military alliances, international conflict, and domestic democratization, demonstrating a statistical approach which
accounts both for the complex interdependencies generated by coevolving multiplex networks of interstate ties and
for their reciprocal influence on the coevolution of domestic political regimes, over the period 1920–2000. The
results show that international institutions and domestic institutions are mutually constituted, with both ‘selection’
effects and ‘influence’ effects operating simultaneously. In particular, the evidence indicates that states with similar
regimes are more prone to ally with each other, mutually democratic dyads are less inclined to engage in militarized
disputes, and states that form international alliances with democratic partners are more likely to develop domestic
democratic institutions. Tests of out-of-sample predictive accuracy, across multidecade prediction windows, further
demonstrate that the coevolutionary model consistently outperforms specifications that ignore coevolutionary effects,
in predicting subsequent patterns of military alliances, military conflict, and domestic democratization.
Keywords
alliance, coevolution, diplomacy, network, security, simulation
Introduction
Scholars of international politics, whether examining
patterns of conflict or of cooperation, are increasingly
coming to the conclusion that the central driving forces
of the international system cannot be accurately repre-
sented by independent dyadic interactions (Franzese &
Hays, 2007; Hays, Kachi & Franzese, 2010; Hoff &
Ward, 2004; Poast, 2010; Ward, Siverson & Cao,
2007), because our behaviors of interest are nearly always
the result of interdependent decisions by states (Signor-
ino, 1999; Maoz, 2010; Warren, 2010). We thus find
substantial evidence in the existing literature that inter-
national militarized disputes evolve in response to an
existing network of disputes (Siverson & King, 1980;
Siverson & Tennefoss, 1984; Oren, 1990; Ward, Siver-
son & Cao, 2007), that international alliances evolve in
response to an existing network of alliances (Bearce &
Bondanella, 2007; Cranmer, Desmarais & Kirkland,
2012; Kinne, 2013a), and that networks of conflict and
cooperation also both evolve in response to each other
(Kimball, 2006; Maoz et al., 2007; Warren, 2010). We
also find evidence that the development of democratic
institutions at the domestic level is conditioned by pat-
terns of conflict and cooperation at the international
level (Gibler & Wolford, 2006; Manger & Pickup,
Corresponding author:
CamberW@gmail.com
Journal of Peace Research
2016, Vol. 53(3) 424–441
ªThe Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343316633375
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2014), while at the same time international conflict and
cooperation are conditioned by domestic regime type
(Dixon, 1994; Schultz, 1998; Russett & Oneal, 2001).
In other words, scholars of international politics gener-
ally face a problem, not simply of network evolution,
but of multilevel, network-behavior coevolution.
Such interdependencies can generate severe difficul-
ties for statistical inference because they characterize a
data generating process which violates the assumption of
conditional independence, which lies at the root of most
of the statistical estimators commonly used in our disci-
pline. This was the basis of the seminal critique launched
by Signorino (1999), arguing that the use of standard
logistic regression to analyze conflict onset events can be
expected to produce biased parameter estimates because
such events are the result of strategic interactions
between states. He proposes a game-theoretic random
utility model to capture the dynamics of strategic antic-
ipation, thereby producing a maximum likelihood esti-
mator which more closely matches the functional form
of the data generating process. However, the need for
alignment between the functional form of a data gener-
ating process and a corresponding statistical estimator is
not restricted to the special case of interdependencies
generated by strategic anticipation, but rather represents
a basic fact about our ability to generate unbiased causal
inferences from observational data (Smith, 1996; Achen,
2002; de Marchi, 2005). Biased parameter estimates will
result any time the functional form of the statistical
model is not consistent with the data generating process
(see Signorino & Yilmaz, 2003).
While a number of approaches have been proposed to
deal with interdependencies generated by evolving net-
works of international ties (Wasserman & Pattison,
1996; Hoff & Ward, 2004; Franzese & Hays, 2007;
Poast, 2010; Warren, 2010; Cranmer & Desmarais,
2011), these approaches have generally forced researchers
into one of two sets of problematic assumptions. Either
they (1) assume the exogeneity of domestic, state-level
attributes, in seeking to explain the dynamic evolution of
international ties, or (2) assume the exogeneity of inter-
national ties in seeking to explain the development of
domestic attributes.
1
In contrast, here I utilize a
simulation-based approach to statistical estimation,
based on an ‘actor-driven’ model of international politics
(Snijders, 1996, 2001), which seeks to capture the
dynamic coevolution of international cooperation, inter-
national conflict, and domestic institutions. This
approach combines a random utility model with Markov
simulations of network evolution at the international
level and behavioral evolution at the domestic level, mak-
ing possible the explicit incorporation of complex coe-
volutionary dynamics, across multiple levels of analysis,
into a single multivariate statistical model. In this way, it
provides a unified framework for both the formalized
representation of theories characterized by multilevel,
network-behavior coevolution, and the specification of
a statistical estimator directly tied to the complex func-
tional form of this data generating process. This analysis
thus represents a novel application of actor-oriented
simulations to inference regarding the coevolutionary
dynamics of state attributes and multiplex international
networks – that is, networks in which nodes are con-
nected through multiple forms of relational ties (see
Vijayaraghavan et al., forthcoming). In particular, this
approach will be used to examine coevolutionary
influences between the network of international mil-
itary alliances, the network of international military
conflicts, and domestic democratization, over the
period 1920–2000.
In the following section, I review the existing research
on the relationship between international alliances, inter-
national conflicts, and domestic regime type, highlight-
ing a debate between scholars who view democratization
as a primary driver of international peace and those who
view the apparent association between democracy and
peace as a spurious relationship stemming from the sta-
bilizing effects of institutions of international military
cooperation. In the sections that follow, I then present
the details of the estimation approach and the operation-
alization of the statistical model, before turning to a
discussion of the empirical findings. These findings are
then further confirmed through extensive sensitivity
checks, which indicate that the central results are robust
to a wide variety of specification choices. Finally, the
empirical validity of the model is assessed through out-
of-sample predictions of network configurations (i.e. alli-
ances and conflicts) and nodal attributes (i.e. democracy)
across varying temporal windows. The results derived
from this analysis demonstrate that international and
domestic institutions are intimately linked through reci-
procal causal processes, with both ‘selection’ effects and
‘influence’ effects operating simultaneously. In particu-
lar, the evidence indicates that states with similar regimes
are more prone to ally with each other, that mutually
democratic dyads are less likely to engage in militarized
disputes, and that states embedded in dense networks of
1
Important exception s to this general tren d are recent works by
Franzese, Hays & Kachi (2012), Manger & Pickup (2014), and
Rhue & Sundararajan (2014).
Warren 425
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